A Translation Report On A General History Of The Huns(Chapter 11)

This is a report on the translation of Lin Gan’s A General History of the Huns(Chapter 11).A General History of the the Huns is a popular historical monograph,which is about one of the ethic minorities along the northern frontier of ancient China,the Huns.The eleventh chapter is mainly about the "Han" regime and the "Former Zhao" regime which were built by the Tuge and the Southern Huns.In this chapter,the author quotes a lot from many Chinese classics to illustrate and support his ideas.The total number of the eleventh chapter is seventeen thousand and four hundred(17,400),and there’s no English transition of the source text yet.During the process of translation,the translator chose to firstly list the different difficulties and then to analyze and illustrate some examples with the use of certain translating techniques.The main difficulties are at two levels:lexical and syntactical.From the lexical perspective,difficulties are mostly about the translation of proper nouns such as names of people and places,culture-loaded words and titles.From the syntactical perspective,difficulties are mostly about the differences between parataxis of Chinese and hypotaxis of English and the English translation of classical Chinese sentences.When translating,the translator adopted methods such as transliteration,free translation,amplification,explanation and their combination to overcome these difficulties and make the translation idiomatic.Through the translation of A General History of the Huns(Chapter 11),the translator realises the importance of the using of proper translating methods.Meanwhile,the translator has a new and deeper understanding of translation,and translating ability of the translator will get improved as well.