要想在译文中保持原作的风格，译者要在译文中设法再现原作的逻辑素。在阅读园林场景描写原文时，我们可以强烈地感到它的节奏美、音乐美。在这段描写中，曹雪芹用了半文半白的语言，行文流畅，每句话就像一个音乐小节，字数和句型都有相似之处。从空间上来讲他用了“上、下、左、右”，从句型上来讲他用了排比句“上面……，下面……”。因此这段文字非常美，读起来朗朗上口。原文如下：

 

 

贾政刚至园门前，只见贾珍带领许多执事人来，一旁侍立。贾政道：“你且把园门都关上，我们先瞧了外面再进去。”贾珍听说，命人将门关了。贾政先秉正看门。只见正门五间，上面桶瓦泥鳅脊，那门栏窗福，皆是细雕新鲜花样，并无朱粉涂饰，一色水磨群墙，下面白石台矶，凿成西番草花样。左右一望，皆雪白粉墙，下面虎皮石，随势砌去，果然不落富丽俗套，自是欢喜……（第十七回）

 

杨宪益译：

At the entrance to the garden，they found Jia Zhen with a group of stewards lined up in wait.

“Close the gate，”said Jia Zheng. “Let us see what it looks like from outside before we go in. ”

Jia Zhen had the gate closed and Jia Zheng inspected the gatehouse, a building in five sections with an arched roof of semicircular tiles. The lintels and lattices，finely carved with ingenious designs, were neither painted nor gilded； the walls were of polished bricks of a uniform colour，and the white marble steps were carved with passion flowers. The garden's spotless whitewashed wall stretching to left and right had，at its base，a mosaic of striped "tiger-skin" stones. The absence of vulgar ostentation pleased him.

霍克斯译：

As soon as they reached the gate they found Cousin Zhen at the head of a group of overseers waiting to learn Jia Zheng’s wishes.

'I want you to close the gate，' said Jia Zheng, ‘so that we can see what it looks like from outside before we go in.’

Cousin Zhen ordered the gate to be closed, and Jia Zheng stood back and studied it gravely.

It was a five-frame gate-building with a hump-backed roof of half-cylinder tiles. The wooden lattice-work of the doors and windows was finely carved and ingeniously patterned. The whole gatehouse was quite unadorned by colour or gilding，yet all was of the most exquisite workmanship. Its walls stood on a terrace of white marble carved with a pattern of passion-flowers in relief， and the garden's whitewashed circumference wall to left and right of it had a footing made of black-and-white striped stone blocks arranged so that the stripes formed a simple pattern. Jia Zheng found the unostentatious simplicity of this entrance greatly to his liking...

 

 

翻译大观园描写时，杨宪益通过介词短语尤其是“with 短语”和“of短语”的重复使用使译文语言流畅、节奏感强。杨译另一个特点是句子的平均长度差和结构差不多，这一点也与原文相似。而霍克斯的译文却没有较好地再现原作的节奏美和音乐美。他的译文中不仅出现了一个长达46个字的句子， 而且其中还用了“so that”句型，译文因此而失去了原作的节奏美。 行文也变得有些拖沓。