An E-C Translation Report On Daily Life In The Mongol Empire (Chapter 11)

This is an English-Chinese translation report.The source text is selected from Daily Life in the Mongol Empire which tells us about various aspects of people's lives under the leadership of Genghis Khan and his descendants including dwellings,food,army,etc.It provides us with objective and comprehensive Mongol historical materials.The translator selected chapter 11 as the content of the translation project.This chapter mainly introduces some representative women who made outstanding contributions and those who had special influence during Mongol-Yuan times.It is expected to provide a certain degree of references and help for the translation study of the Mongol historical materials through the translation of this chapter and the writing of the corresponding translation report.The translator first analyzed the source text,which belongs to the historical text.According to the classification of text types by Katharina Reiss,a German translation theorist,historical texts belong to informative texts.Therefore,the translator hopes to do her best to present the information that the source text contains.However,the translator encountered many difficulties during the translation process.At the lexical level,a large number of proper nouns have emerged,such as names of people,names of places,etc.Some proper nouns will affect the readers' understanding of the translation text if they are not explained.In addition,there are many words with rich historical and cultural information.These words,though normal and common,have completely different meanings in a particular text.At the sentence level,due to the existence of the plentiful proper nouns,many sentences with appositives appear.Besides,due to the fact that English is a hypotaxis-led language,there are a great many of clauses,of which the attributive clauses are more difficult to translate.Finally,because the same reason that English is a hypotaxis-led language,there exist plenty of long sentences.Different translation methods were used to solve those difficulties.In terms of words,thetranslator first consulted a large number of related materials to determine the translation of these proper nouns.In order to explain those proper names that are rather difficult to understand,the translator then adopted the most commonly used methods in translating them: adding footnotes and cut-in notes;choosing the word-meanings was used to translate those words that are rich in historical and cultural information.As for the sentences,when dealing with sentences with appositives,the translator adopted the methods of sequential translation,reverse translation,placing the appositives into the round brackets and translating them into separate sentences;when translating attributive clauses,preposition,postposition and combination were used;the translator mainly chose dividing,recasting along with amplification to translate long sentences.