An E-C Translation Report On Daily Life In The Mongol Empire(Chapter 5)

This is an English-Chinese translation report based on Chapter 5 of Daily Life in the Mongol Empire.The book mainly describes many aspects of the daily life of the Mongols,including food and drinking,architecture,religion,etc.The fifth chapter selected mainly deals with the military aspect covering the introduction of horses,weapons,tactics and so on.The book provides some references for readers to understand the history and culture of the Mongol Empire systematically and comprehensively.In this translation report,the translator first briefly introduces the source text and the author.Secondly,the translation process is elaborated at length.Finally,the difficulties encountered in the process of translating and the corresponding translation methods and techniques are analyzed with specific examples.The impediments met in the translating process merely lie in the lexical level and the syntactic level.The lexical difficulties are mainly reflected in translating proper nouns with ethnic characteristics,culture-loaded words and the shift of parts of speech.At the syntactic level,translating attributive clauses,passive sentences and long sentences has been an obstacle for the translator.Two methods are adopted for proper nouns.Since the selected text covers the history and culture of the Mongol Empire,the established translations of quite a number of proper nouns could be found.Therefore,the translator has to choose the most appropriate one among those versions rather than translate them at random;in addition,transliteration is used for proper nouns that have not been translated.When it comes to translating culture-loaded words,the translator employs the method of annotation to supplement their cultural connotations,which enables the target readers to have a better understanding of the source text.Moreover,conversion of parts of speech is applied for the problems caused by parts of speech.At the syntactic level,three methods are adopted for attributive clauses,including preposition,postposition and placing the attributive clause before the whole sentence according to the sentence structure.In terms of translating passive sentences,the passive structure and conversion of sentence voices are the main methods.Ultimately,in terms of long sentences with complex structure,the translator translates them by following the original syntactic order or dividing them into several parts in accordance with group meanings.The translator has learned a lot and realized her own shortcomings through the translation practice.In the future,the translator will continue to learn and strive to promote the translation capability.