David Hawkes, one of the foremost English translators of Hongloumeng, completed the translation out of a profound love for the work. His goal was to faithfully reproduce the literary value and cultural connotations of the original text, thereby securing broader global recognition for this classic work. This study focuses the traditional Chinese banquet game Yapailing, thus exploring how this traditional Chinese knowledge is represented and generated for Western English readers through Hawkes’ translation. By doing so, it delves into the intrinsic principles and guiding motivations underlying Hawkes’s knowledge generation. The modes of knowledge generation, intrinsic principles, and guiding motivations are organically unified. The knowledge generation in literary texts is closely connected to the translator’s overall translation behaviour and aligns with his/her motivations. Guided by these motivations and adhering to intrinsic principles, the translator employs different modes to represent knowledge, thus generating it. Aiming at the coherence and completeness of the narrative as well as the readability and accessibility for readers, Hawkes adpots seemingly contradictory approaches of adding and reducing information, which actually help insist on prioritizing the core knowledge in translation while reducing the burden of non-core knowledge for readers. Hawkes’s knowledge generation in the English translation of Yapailing exemplifies how the translator plays an active role in knowledge generation within literary works.