An E-C Translation Report On Among The Mongols（Chapters One To Three）

This is a report on English-Chinese translation practice.The selected work is Among the Mongols,a documentary literary work written by the famous British missionary James Gilmour and published in 2013.This book gives a detailed account of James Gilmour’s journey from Beijing to Mongolia since 1870,and gives a classic description of Mongolian life and customs.This translation practice report selects the contents of the first three chapters of the text,which mainly describes what Gilmour saw and heard when he first came to Mongolia,studied Mongolian,arrived in the southeast of Baikal Lake from Russia,and began to carry out missionary work among Buriat.The selected source text has 10,000 words,and the target text is at 15,479 characters.This translation practice report first introduces the background and significance of the translation project,and also makes a detailed analysis of the content and type of the translation text,as well as the structure of the translation report.Second,in the light of Peter Newmark’s text theory and semantic and communicative translation theory,the source text is classified as a text with expressive,informative and vocative functions.Then the translator gives a brief account of the whole translation process before,during and after the translation.During the translation process,the translator’s translation difficulties mainly focus on three levels: lexis,syntax and text.In the aspect of vocabulary,the difficulties mainly include the translation of the omitted words in the source text and the vocabulary related to the background knowledge,while in the aspect of syntax,the translation of long sentences and attributive clauses are mainly involved.At the textual level,the main difficulties are the cohesion of the text and the logical relationship between the sentences.In view of the difficulties mentioned above,the translator uses seven translation strategies to solve problems under the guideline of semantic and communicative translation.At the lexical level,the translation methods used are amplification and annotation.At the sentence level,the main approach is to keep the original sequence,recasting and division.At the textual level,ellipsis and repetition are the main methods of translation.Chapter Five summarizes the achievements and limitations of the translation report.Through the translation of the first three chapters of Among the Mongols,the translator realizes that the translation of this text can help Chinese readers better understand Mongolian society in the late Qing Dynasty,and also provide some reference for translators of other Mongolian historical works.