A Dream of Red Mansions has been researched in Chinese translation circle for a long time. In the thirties of the nineteenth century, A Dream of Red Mansions was partially first translated into English, and the whole version appeared in the seventies of the twentieth century, which was translated by Chinese translator Yang Xianyi and professor David Hawkes (and John Minford) at Oxford University. Since then translation research about the English version has been flourishing and gradually becomes a hot point.

Viewed from research objects, about 80 percent of papers take the two complete versions-the Yang’s and the Hawkes’ - as the research objects or the research materials, which indicates that the appearance of the two whole versions largely promote the researches on A Dream of Red Mansions and its English versions.

Viewed from research methods, numerous researches use analysis and induction method to compare the two complete English versions, and the data specification and parallel corpus are less used. Nevertheless, the persity of Chinese versions of A Dream of Red Mansions may induce the mismatching of subtext and translation.

Viewed from research topics, they can be mainly pided into five categories.

The traditional prospective is from the specific language which includes poem, dialogue, idiom and architectural name, and the representative is A New English Translation of Idioms in <A Dream of Red Mansions> by Zhang Peiji (1980), which objectively estimates the English translation of idioms. The next prospective is from the cultural content including religious culture, linguistic culture, social culture, custom culture and so on. The third category is comparing two English versions to make discussion and analysis on the method, principle and standard of translation. For instance, Chinese translator, Zheng Enyue researched the person problem in poetry translation and concluded that the personal view directly affected the readers’ sensibility to the work (2008). The last prospective is from the discourse analysis, which gets rid of the constraint of textual details.

Viewed from the translation theories, various translation theories were introduced into China in recent years, which provide powerful theory support and research perspectives to the research of various versions of A dream of Red Mansions. These theories of translation mainly cover the theory of domestication and foreignization, the theory of functional equivalence and so on. At the same time, the research on translation theories in China is still in its initial stage, where applications and development of the theory are still lacking.

In the above categories, we can find that in recent twenty years, the study on English translation of A Dream of Red Mansions has got great achievements which mainly cover four respects: language, poem, culture and translation criterion. In addition, scholars pay more and more attention to studying the English translation of A Dream of Red Mansions from a cultural prospective, which leads a great progress in translation studies.

1.2 Significance of the Research

Culture is the sum of material and spiritual wealth which are created by human beings during the process of creating history. Hence, culture is a complicated system of cognition and application. Dietary culture is an important branch of culture, and it includes political science, medical science, ethics and philosophy.

As the old proverb goes, “Hunger breeds discontent.” According to the historical records, Chinese dietary culture could be traced back to eight thousand years ago. Besides, Chinese dietary culture has always been considered as the vital sign of China’s traditional material civilization and emerges in many of classical literary works, and A Dream of Red Mansions is one of the representative works. As an encyclopedia of Chinese culture, A Dream of Red Mansions refers to 186 kinds of foods which can be pided into nine species: main courses, snacks, cooked food, condiments, fruits, drinks, supplements, washing necessity and foreign foods.