A Comparative Study Of Cultural Translation On The Secret History Of The Mongols-from The Perspective Of Rewriting Theory

The Secret History of the Mongols is recognized as a great book of cultural heritage bythe international academics. It records the Mongolian historic events from ancient mythologyto the1240s, centers on the history of Genghis Khan’s “Golden Family”. Compiled by centralgovernment, it is one of the three historical records of Mongolian ethnic group. Itdemonstrates historical, cultural and literary heritage of Mongolian ethnic group. Known as“the encyclopedia of Mongols”, the book covers the Mongolian politics, economy, military,religion, language, literature and culture.The Secret History of the Mongols was compiled into a book774years ago according tothe deduction of the academics. It mainly records the Mongolian history from the ancienttimes to the1240s, centered on the story of Genghis Khan’s “Gold Family”. Because of thelost of the original version written in Uyghur Mongolian alphabets, the earliest existingversion that can be found today is a version compiled by the Imperial Academy of the MingDynasty. This version is also called Yuanchao Mishi, which consists of phonetic notations ofChinese characters (Transcription), word-for-word Chinese translations (Literal Translation)and Chinese general translations of each section (General Translation).Because of the uniqueness of the version of The Secret History of the Mongols of theMing Dynasty, the book is also called “a unique and wonderful book”, which has a very highacademic value. At home and abroad, the research studies on The Secret History of theMongols mainly focus on the studies of history, secret history, literature and ethnology of theMongolian ethnic group. In the field of literature, the studies mainly focus on the editing ofancient Chinese versions and the restoration of the original Mongolian version. Since the mid-19th century, versions of The Secret History of the Mongols translated into differentlanguages have sprung up, but translation studies to this book have not been given enoughattention, so that only a few research results have been made. The cultural study on translationof The Secret History of the Mongols is still a vacancy in academic field. As a result, thisthesis will take three full-text-translated English versions as the study objects, and do somein-depth comparative studies from the perspective of cultural translation.The “cultural turn” puts the translation study into a historical, social and culturalbackground instead of the traditional linguistics study. As the representative of culturaltranslation study, André Lefevere reiterates in his books that texts are not written in avacuum; as a result, the translations will not take place in a vacuum. Apart from language,translations are constrained by ideology, poetics and universe of discourse. In the descending order of importance, they are ideology, poetics, universe of discourse and language. In thiscase, translation is actually a rewriting of the original text, so is the translation of The SecretHistory of the Mongols.Cleaves’ version, Onon’s revised version and Rachewiltz’s revised version of The SecretHistory of the Mongols are adopted to make a comparative study in this thesis. Taking“rewriting” theory proposed by André Lefevere as its theoretical framework, this thesis makesa translation study from the perspective of cultural translation. A comparative study on thesource text and the translation of the target texts is made on the level of ideology, poetics,universe of discourse and language. This thesis manages to explore the way that thetranslation affected by ideology, poetics, universe of discourse and language of the targettexts, make a comprehensive analysis and evaluation on the three English versions, anddeduce the possible translation strategy of each English version. Besides, this thesis tries todemonstrate that the ideologies of the three translators play the dominant roles on theirtranslations of The Secret History of the Mongols. Hopefully, this thesis can make a certaincontribution on the cultural translation study of The Secret History of the Mongols.