En tant que traducteur professionnel, je travaille sur la traduction d'un roman classique chinois dont l'original présente de nombreux jeux de mots et allusions culturelles. Les différentes approches de traduction observées sur "Le Rêve de la Chambre Rouge" me laissent perplexe : certaines traductions privilégient la fidélité littérale, d'autres une approche plus interprétative. Comment puis-je choisir la meilleure stratégie pour préserver à la fois l'authenticité culturelle et la lisibilité du texte pour le public cible ?
Translations and reception in the West

... one of the great monuments of the world's literature...

Cao utilizes many levels of colloquial and literary language and incorporates forms of classic poetry that are integral to the novel, making it a major challenge to translate. A 2014 study of fourteen translations of the novel concluded that the work is a "challenge even to the most resourceful of translators, and the process of rendering it into another language is bound to involve more translation problems, techniques, and principles than the process of rendering any other literary work." Accordingly, the aims and achievements of the translators differ widely.

The first recorded translation into English was in 1812 by the Protestant missionary and sinologist Robert Morrison (1782–1834), who translated part of chapter four for the second volume of his unpublished 1812 book Horae Sinicae. In 1816, Morrison did publish a translation of a conversation from chapter 31 in his Chinese language textbook Dialogues and Detached Sentences in the Chinese Language. In 1819, the British diplomat and sinologist John Francis Davis (1795–1890) published a short excerpt in the London Journal Quarterly Review. Davis also published a poem from chapter 3 in the 1830 Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society. In 1842, Karl Gützlaff 's article, "Hung Lau Mung, or Dreams in the Red Chamber", in the sixth volume of the "Chinese Repository", included translation and criticism of some passages.

A literal translation of selected passages was published for foreigners learning Chinese by the Presbyterian Mission Press of Ningbo in 1846. Edward Charles Bowra of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs published a translation of the first eight chapters in 1868 and H. Bencraft Joly of the first fifty-six chapters in 1892. The Reverend E.J. Eitel reviewed Joly's translation and condemned the novel, saying that Chinese read it "because of its wickedness." Herbert Giles, whom John Minford called "one of the more free-thinking British consular officers," took a more favorable view in a twenty-five page synopsis in 1885 that Minford calls still a "useful guide." Giles further highlighted it in his A History of Chinese Literature in 1901.

In 1928, Elfrida Hudson published a short introduction to the novel titled "An old, old story". An abridged translation by Wang Chi-Chen which emphasized the central love story was published in 1929, with a preface by Arthur Waley. Waley said that "we feel most clearly the symbolic or universal value" of the characters in the passages which recount dreams. "Pao Yu", Waley continued, stands for "imagination and poetry" and his father for "all those sordid powers of pedantry and restriction which hamper the artist". In a 1930 review of Wang's translation, Harry Clemons of The Virginia Quarterly Review wrote "This is a great novel", and along with the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it "ranks foremost" among the novels of classic Chinese literature. Although Clemons felt "meaning was only fragmentarily revealed" in the English translated prose and that "many of the incidents" and "much of the poetry" were omitted, he nevertheless thought "at any rate the effort to read The Dream of the Red Chamber is eminently worth making." In 1958 Wang published an expansion on his earlier abridgement, though it was still truncated at 60 chapters.

The stream of translations and literary studies in the West grew steadily, building on Chinese language scholarship. The 1932 German translation by Franz Kuhn was the basis of an abridged version, The Dream of the Red Chamber, by Florence and Isabel McHugh published in 1958, and a later French version. Critic Anthony West wrote in The New Yorker in 1958 that the novel is to the Chinese "very much what The Brothers Karamazov is to Russian and Remembrance of Things Past is to French literature" and "it is beyond question one of the great novels of all literature." Kenneth Rexroth in a 1958 review of the McHugh translation, describes the novel as among the "greatest works of prose fiction in all the history of literature", for it is "profoundly humane". Bramwell Seaton Bonsall finished what is probably the first complete 120 chapter translation in the 1950s, Red Chamber Dream, but publication was abandoned when Penguin announced the Hawkes project. A typescript is available on the web.

The respected and prolific Yang Hsien-yi was commissioned to translate the first complete English version. Though he confessed that this was his least favorite of the classic novels, Yang began work in 1961 and had finished roughly 100 chapters in 1964, when he was ordered to stop. He and his wife, Gladys Yang, were imprisoned on suspicion of espionage during the Cultural Revolution, but they finished the translation as a team after their release in 1974. It was published by Beijing Foreign Language Press as A Dream of Red Mansions, in three volumes, 1978–1980. The second complete English translation to be published was by David Hawkes some century and a half after the first English translation. Hawkes was already a recognised redologist and had previously translated Chu Ci when Penguin Classics approached him in 1970 to make a translation which could appeal to English readers. After resigning from his professorial position, Hawkes published the first eighty chapters in three volumes (1973, 1977, 1980). The Story of the Stone (1973–1980), the first eighty chapters translated by Hawkes and last forty by his son-in-law John Minford consists of five volumes and 2,339 pages of actual core text (not including Prefaces, Introductions and Appendices) and over 2,800 pages in total. The word count of the Penguin Classics English translation is estimated at 845,000 words. In a 1980 review of the Hawkes and Minford translation in The New York Review of Books, Frederic Wakeman, Jr. described the novel as a "masterpiece" and the work of a "literary genius". Cynthia L. Chennault of the University of Florida stated that "The Dream is acclaimed as one of the most psychologically penetrating novels of world literature." The novel and its author have been described as among the most significant works of literature and literary figures of the past millennium.

The sinologist Oldřich Král also undertook a Czech translation of the entire novel, Sen v červeném domě (Prague: Odeon, three volumes, 1986–1988). Slovak sinologist and philosopher Marina Čarnogurská translated into Slovak whole four volumes of the novel, Sen o Červenom pavilóne (Bratislava: Petrus, 2001–2003. ISBN 80-88939-25-9).

In 2014, an abridged English translation of Dream by writer Lin Yutang resurfaced in a Japanese library. Lin's translation, about half the length of the original, is reportedly not a literal one.

In a study of fourteen translations into English, German, French, Spanish, Laurence K.P. Wong finds that some challenges to translation are "surmountable", some "insurmountable," though translators sometimes hit on "surprisingly happy versions that come very close to the original," Hawkes, however, normally came up with versions that are "accurate, ingenious, and delightful...." Hawkes recreates the meanings and sounds of the original with "remarkable precision, achieving much greater success than any one of his fellow translators in surmounting the limits of literary translation...." Another scholar agreed that the Yang's translation is "literal" in the sense of rendering word for word, but argued that the Hawkes translation achieved what should be called a "higher level of literalness: in the sense of "text for text." That is, Hawkes tries to maintain the range and contrasting levels of usage of the original while the Yangs smooth out the language with a "plain international English" and add explanations in footnotes.

Other scholars examined particular aspects of the Yangs' translation and the Hawkes and Minford translation. The names of some characters sound like the words for their personality traits, and some names serve as allusions. Hawkes conveys the communicative function of the names rather than lexical equivalence; for example, Huo Qi is homonymous with "the beginning of catastrophe", and Hawkes makes the English name "Calamity". Hawkes sometimes uses Italian / Sanskrit terms when Western Christian culture lacks a term for a concept. Gladys Yang and Yang Hsien-yi prefer literal translation, informing readers of names' meanings through annotations. Zhu Jian-chun argued that Hawkes’ choice to simply translate certain names that are puns makes the author's intentions clearer, and that the Yangs' choice of transliteration leaves the meaning more elusive, even if the transliterated names are more believable as character names. Zhu questioned the Yangs' translation of "Dao Ren" as "reverend". According to Barry Lee Reynolds and Chao-Chih Liao, the Yangs' version contains more faithful translations of religious expressions but is also less readable to English language readers. Xuxiang Suo argued, “Hawkes successfully conveyed the original textual information to foreign readers with smooth and beautiful English, but the loss of Chinese culture-loaded information is inevitable. Mr. Yang mostly adopted the way of literal translation, trying his best to keep the true and idiomatic Chinese style and national tint."
La littérature chinoise

En traduisant la littérature chinoise, les traducteurs peinent à trouver une fidélité véritable dans la transposition vers la langue cible. Dans *The Poem Behind the Poem*, Barnstone soutient que la poésie "ne peut pas être forcée à chanter par une mathématique qui ne prend pas en compte la créativité du traducteur".

Une œuvre notable traduite en anglais est le *Wen Xuan*, une anthologie représentative des œuvres majeures de la littérature chinoise. Traduire cet ouvrage exige une connaissance approfondie des genres présentés dans le livre, tels que les formes poétiques, les différents types de prose, notamment les mémoires, les lettres, les proclamations, les poèmes élogieux, les édits, les dissertations historiques, philosophiques et politiques, les threnodies et les lamentations pour les morts, ainsi que les essais d'examen. Ainsi, le traducteur littéraire doit se familiariser avec les écrits, les vies et la pensée d'un grand nombre de ses 130 auteurs, faisant du *Wen Xuan* l'une des œuvres littéraires les plus difficiles à traduire.
### Query ###
En tant que traducteur professionnel, je travaille sur la traduction d'un roman classique chinois dont l'original présente de nombreux jeux de mots et allusions culturelles. Les différentes approches de traduction observées sur "Le Rêve de la Chambre Rouge" me laissent perplexe : certaines traductions privilégient la fidélité littérale, d'autres une approche plus interprétative. Comment puis-je choisir la meilleure stratégie pour préserver à la fois l'authenticité culturelle et la lisibilité du texte pour le public cible ?

### Main Text ###
Translations and reception in the West

... one of the great monuments of the world's literature...

Cao utilizes many levels of colloquial and literary language and incorporates forms of classic poetry that are integral to the novel, making it a major challenge to translate. A 2014 study of fourteen translations of the novel concluded that the work is a "challenge even to the most resourceful of translators, and the process of rendering it into another language is bound to involve more translation problems, techniques, and principles than the process of rendering any other literary work." Accordingly, the aims and achievements of the translators differ widely.

The first recorded translation into English was in 1812 by the Protestant missionary and sinologist Robert Morrison (1782–1834), who translated part of chapter four for the second volume of his unpublished 1812 book Horae Sinicae. In 1816, Morrison did publish a translation of a conversation from chapter 31 in his Chinese language textbook Dialogues and Detached Sentences in the Chinese Language. In 1819, the British diplomat and sinologist John Francis Davis (1795–1890) published a short excerpt in the London Journal Quarterly Review. Davis also published a poem from chapter 3 in the 1830 Transactions of the Royal Asiatic Society. In 1842, Karl Gützlaff 's article, "Hung Lau Mung, or Dreams in the Red Chamber", in the sixth volume of the "Chinese Repository", included translation and criticism of some passages.

A literal translation of selected passages was published for foreigners learning Chinese by the Presbyterian Mission Press of Ningbo in 1846. Edward Charles Bowra of the Chinese Imperial Maritime Customs published a translation of the first eight chapters in 1868 and H. Bencraft Joly of the first fifty-six chapters in 1892. The Reverend E.J. Eitel reviewed Joly's translation and condemned the novel, saying that Chinese read it "because of its wickedness." Herbert Giles, whom John Minford called "one of the more free-thinking British consular officers," took a more favorable view in a twenty-five page synopsis in 1885 that Minford calls still a "useful guide." Giles further highlighted it in his A History of Chinese Literature in 1901.

In 1928, Elfrida Hudson published a short introduction to the novel titled "An old, old story". An abridged translation by Wang Chi-Chen which emphasized the central love story was published in 1929, with a preface by Arthur Waley. Waley said that "we feel most clearly the symbolic or universal value" of the characters in the passages which recount dreams. "Pao Yu", Waley continued, stands for "imagination and poetry" and his father for "all those sordid powers of pedantry and restriction which hamper the artist". In a 1930 review of Wang's translation, Harry Clemons of The Virginia Quarterly Review wrote "This is a great novel", and along with the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, it "ranks foremost" among the novels of classic Chinese literature. Although Clemons felt "meaning was only fragmentarily revealed" in the English translated prose and that "many of the incidents" and "much of the poetry" were omitted, he nevertheless thought "at any rate the effort to read The Dream of the Red Chamber is eminently worth making." In 1958 Wang published an expansion on his earlier abridgement, though it was still truncated at 60 chapters.

The stream of translations and literary studies in the West grew steadily, building on Chinese language scholarship. The 1932 German translation by Franz Kuhn was the basis of an abridged version, The Dream of the Red Chamber, by Florence and Isabel McHugh published in 1958, and a later French version. Critic Anthony West wrote in The New Yorker in 1958 that the novel is to the Chinese "very much what The Brothers Karamazov is to Russian and Remembrance of Things Past is to French literature" and "it is beyond question one of the great novels of all literature." Kenneth Rexroth in a 1958 review of the McHugh translation, describes the novel as among the "greatest works of prose fiction in all the history of literature", for it is "profoundly humane". Bramwell Seaton Bonsall finished what is probably the first complete 120 chapter translation in the 1950s, Red Chamber Dream, but publication was abandoned when Penguin announced the Hawkes project. A typescript is available on the web.

The respected and prolific Yang Hsien-yi was commissioned to translate the first complete English version. Though he confessed that this was his least favorite of the classic novels, Yang began work in 1961 and had finished roughly 100 chapters in 1964, when he was ordered to stop. He and his wife, Gladys Yang, were imprisoned on suspicion of espionage during the Cultural Revolution, but they finished the translation as a team after their release in 1974. It was published by Beijing Foreign Language Press as A Dream of Red Mansions, in three volumes, 1978–1980. The second complete English translation to be published was by David Hawkes some century and a half after the first English translation. Hawkes was already a recognised redologist and had previously translated Chu Ci when Penguin Classics approached him in 1970 to make a translation which could appeal to English readers. After resigning from his professorial position, Hawkes published the first eighty chapters in three volumes (1973, 1977, 1980). The Story of the Stone (1973–1980), the first eighty chapters translated by Hawkes and last forty by his son-in-law John Minford consists of five volumes and 2,339 pages of actual core text (not including Prefaces, Introductions and Appendices) and over 2,800 pages in total. The word count of the Penguin Classics English translation is estimated at 845,000 words. In a 1980 review of the Hawkes and Minford translation in The New York Review of Books, Frederic Wakeman, Jr. described the novel as a "masterpiece" and the work of a "literary genius". Cynthia L. Chennault of the University of Florida stated that "The Dream is acclaimed as one of the most psychologically penetrating novels of world literature." The novel and its author have been described as among the most significant works of literature and literary figures of the past millennium.

The sinologist Oldřich Král also undertook a Czech translation of the entire novel, Sen v červeném domě (Prague: Odeon, three volumes, 1986–1988). Slovak sinologist and philosopher Marina Čarnogurská translated into Slovak whole four volumes of the novel, Sen o Červenom pavilóne (Bratislava: Petrus, 2001–2003. ISBN 80-88939-25-9).

In 2014, an abridged English translation of Dream by writer Lin Yutang resurfaced in a Japanese library. Lin's translation, about half the length of the original, is reportedly not a literal one.

In a study of fourteen translations into English, German, French, Spanish, Laurence K.P. Wong finds that some challenges to translation are "surmountable", some "insurmountable," though translators sometimes hit on "surprisingly happy versions that come very close to the original," Hawkes, however, normally came up with versions that are "accurate, ingenious, and delightful...." Hawkes recreates the meanings and sounds of the original with "remarkable precision, achieving much greater success than any one of his fellow translators in surmounting the limits of literary translation...." Another scholar agreed that the Yang's translation is "literal" in the sense of rendering word for word, but argued that the Hawkes translation achieved what should be called a "higher level of literalness: in the sense of "text for text." That is, Hawkes tries to maintain the range and contrasting levels of usage of the original while the Yangs smooth out the language with a "plain international English" and add explanations in footnotes.

Other scholars examined particular aspects of the Yangs' translation and the Hawkes and Minford translation. The names of some characters sound like the words for their personality traits, and some names serve as allusions. Hawkes conveys the communicative function of the names rather than lexical equivalence; for example, Huo Qi is homonymous with "the beginning of catastrophe", and Hawkes makes the English name "Calamity". Hawkes sometimes uses Italian / Sanskrit terms when Western Christian culture lacks a term for a concept. Gladys Yang and Yang Hsien-yi prefer literal translation, informing readers of names' meanings through annotations. Zhu Jian-chun argued that Hawkes’ choice to simply translate certain names that are puns makes the author's intentions clearer, and that the Yangs' choice of transliteration leaves the meaning more elusive, even if the transliterated names are more believable as character names. Zhu questioned the Yangs' translation of "Dao Ren" as "reverend". According to Barry Lee Reynolds and Chao-Chih Liao, the Yangs' version contains more faithful translations of religious expressions but is also less readable to English language readers. Xuxiang Suo argued, “Hawkes successfully conveyed the original textual information to foreign readers with smooth and beautiful English, but the loss of Chinese culture-loaded information is inevitable. Mr. Yang mostly adopted the way of literal translation, trying his best to keep the true and idiomatic Chinese style and national tint."

### Supplementary Text ###
La littérature chinoise

En traduisant la littérature chinoise, les traducteurs peinent à trouver une fidélité véritable dans la transposition vers la langue cible. Dans *The Poem Behind the Poem*, Barnstone soutient que la poésie "ne peut pas être forcée à chanter par une mathématique qui ne prend pas en compte la créativité du traducteur".

Une œuvre notable traduite en anglais est le *Wen Xuan*, une anthologie représentative des œuvres majeures de la littérature chinoise. Traduire cet ouvrage exige une connaissance approfondie des genres présentés dans le livre, tels que les formes poétiques, les différents types de prose, notamment les mémoires, les lettres, les proclamations, les poèmes élogieux, les édits, les dissertations historiques, philosophiques et politiques, les threnodies et les lamentations pour les morts, ainsi que les essais d'examen. Ainsi, le traducteur littéraire doit se familiariser avec les écrits, les vies et la pensée d'un grand nombre de ses 130 auteurs, faisant du *Wen Xuan* l'une des œuvres littéraires les plus difficiles à traduire.

### Draft ###

Query breakdown: "roman classique chinois" → likely *Dream of Red Chamber* (Hongloumeng). "jeux de mots et allusions culturelles" → translation problem space well-mapped in Chinese literary studies.

**Problem classification**: Not simple retrieval. Complex interpretive synthesis required.

Domain triangulation:
├─ Chinese classical literature: 18th century vernacular fiction
├─ Translation theory: cultural transfer, linguistic loss
├─ Comparative literature: cross-cultural accessibility  
└─ Reader psychology: target audience expectations

**Key constraint**: Classical Chinese literary translation = inherently impossible. Always loss.

→ *Dream of Red Chamber* specifically: extreme linguistic density. Character names = phonetic puns. Verse integration. Colloquial registers mixing with classical. 

**Translation approaches identified**:
● Literal fidelity camp: Maximize source text preservation
● Interpretative camp: Prioritize target language accessibility

**Critical assessment**: 

Yang Hsien-yi/David Hawkes debate = central case study.
- Yangs: word-for-word literalism
- Hawkes: semantic recreation, cultural adaptation

⟨H≈0.8⟩ *The Hawkes approach... recreating Sanskrit terms for absent Buddhist concepts in English prose. "Bodhisattva" becoming "enlightenment-being" - linguistic birth in target language. But... what dies in translation? The Chinese reader's internal recognition systems...*

**Strategic synthesis**:

For your specific context → consider tiered approach:

**Tier 1**: Scholarly editions preserve maximal source data
- Footnotes explaining puns, cultural allusions  
- Transliteration of proper names
- Annotation of verse forms

**Tier 2**: Readable narrative text
- Fluent English prose
- Cultural explanations integrated
- Name translations that function semantically

**Key insight**: ∴ No pure solution. Every approach = compromise.

**Decision framework**:
1. Target audience analysis
2. Preservation vs accessibility weighting  
3. Cultural context transfer methods

**Practical recommendations**:
- Embrace annotation as solution
- Use different text types for different readers
- Consider bilingual or multilingual approaches

**Final assessment**: Your perplexity = normal scholarly anxiety. Translation = cultural archaeology. Always fragments remain.

NB: The "best strategy" = recognizing impossibility, choosing appropriate compromise level for target context.

### Answer###
Votre préoccupation concernant la traduction de jeux de mots et d'allusions culturelles dans "Le Rêve de la Chambre Rouge" touche directement à l'un des défis majeurs de la traduction littéraire chinoise. Cette œuvre constitue effectivement un test particulier pour les traducteurs, nécessitant des solutions innovantes pour préserver les multiples niveaux de langue et les formes poétiques classiques intégrées au récit.

Les approches de traduction observées reflètent différentes stratégies fondamentales : certaines privilégient la fidélité littérale, tandis que d'autres adoptent une approche plus interprétative. Cette dichotomie s'observe notamment dans les travaux de Yang Hsien-yi et Gladys Yang, qui ont opté pour une traduction mot à mot respectueuse, expliquant les significations à travers des annotations, contre l'approche de David Hawkes, qui privilégie la création de versions précises, ingénieuses et délicieuses en anglais, parfois au détriment de la préservation stricte de certains éléments culturels.

Pour votre contexte spécifique de traduction d'un roman classique chinois, plusieurs considérations méritent attention. Les noms de personnages, qui constituent souvent des jeux de mots visuels ou phonétiques, peuvent être rendus de manière à préserver leur fonction communicative plutôt que leur équivalence lexicale stricte. Les références culturelles et allusions peuvent nécessiter des explications en notes de bas de page ou une reformulation dans le texte cible.

La question de l'accessibilité du texte pour le public cible implique un équilibre délicat : une traduction trop littérale peut rendre le texte inintelligible, tandis qu'une approche excessivement interprétative risque de diluer l'authenticité culturelle. Les études comparatives suggèrent qu'il existe des limites insurmontables aux techniques de traduction littéraire, mais qu'il est possible d'obtenir des versions "surprenamment heureuses qui se rapprochent beaucoup du texte original".

Pour votre travail, envisagez une approche hybride respectant la richesse linguistique de l'œuvre source tout en assurant la lisibilité pour le lecteur cible, en adaptant la stratégie selon le type de lecteur et les contextes d'utilisation envisagés.