Abstract：Personal name itself is not only a pure symbol in a language but also a cultural and social symbol. Therefore, what a translator must consider is how to make their translations of the common names more prescriptive, especially how to reveal the literature works and keep the original styles furthest in translating the personal names. In view of this, this paper gives an analysis of the translation of the personal names in the two English versions of A Dream of Red Mansions (Yang's and Hawkes') , and mainly explores several different translation skills, such as transliteration, semantic translation, pun, French, Latin language, etc.

Keyword：personal names; A Dream of Red Mansions; English translation; transliteration; semantic translation;