The E-C Translation Report On The Mongol Art Of War(Chapter Four-Five)

The form of this report is an English to Chinese translation practice report.The chosen text is a newly published book The Mongol Art of War written by an American Mongol historical specialist,Prof.Timothy May.This book is a typical Mongolian military historiography,which mainly describes the organization,training,weapons and equipment,logistics as well as the tactics of the Mongol Army.There are Korean and Polish translations of this book at present.The selected text is Chapter Four to Chapter Five,consisting of about 10524 words with the 17781 Chinese words translation.The two chapters are the core chapters of this book,which describe the care of the Mongolian army,espionage,tactics and strategy in detail.This book has high academic value,which shows little-know details of Mongolian army's logistics,supply,medical care,tactics army generals and details in the Mongolian war,and provides more historical materials for the study of Mongolian military history.The source text is characterized by clear and well arranged structure.The translation of this book belongs to historical translation in the non-literary translation which is more like the informative text translation.As a historical text,there exist many translation difficulties,including(1)the translation of Mongolian tactical terms,Mongolian military system terms and Mongolian culture-loaded words;(2)sentence structure and order,semantic integrity and semantic redundancy;(3)the translation of the captions,footnotes and the usage of punctuations and so on.To deal with these difficulties,the author translates with the help of communicative translation theory of Newmark,who is a British linguist and translation theorist.The communicative translation focuses on target readers' feelings and acceptability.The translation shows fluency and accuracy.The translation report analyzes the translation from the perspectives of lexical,syntactic and semantic difficulties and illustrates a large number of examples.According to the analysis,(1)many Mongolian military terms are obscure,thus the author tends to use the commonly translated and easy-to-understand Chinese translation or self-translation on the basis of accurately transmitting the original information;(2)the translation can accord with the use and characteristics of language by adjusting order and structure,addition,using Chinese four-character phrases and changing the punctuations;(3)the translation of captions should be concise;(4)the author also adds footnotes to explain the complicated and ambiguous terms,so that the translation can be more clearly.