A Comparative Study Of Thick Translation In The English Versions Of The Secret History Of The Mongols

Of the numerous and voluminous historical books in East Asia,the ones written in Chinese by Chinese historians constitute the vast majority.Among those historical documents of ethnics,The Secret History of the Mongols,which takes a bona fide indigenous stance without being influenced by any introduced religious world outlook,is extremely rare.Just as B.J.Vladimircov says in his The History of Mongolian Social System,"...rather than other nomadic groups,it is the Mongolian people who create a classic like The Secret History of the Mongols which vividly depicts real life." The Secret History of the Mongols,with its all-embracing contents,is considered as an encyclopedic work of the Mongolian ethnic group.In addition,its currently extant Mongolian phonetic text in Chinese transcription,entitled Yuan-ch'ao pi-shih,can be dubbed a miracle in its own right in the history of Chinese literature.The research into the English versions of The Secret History of the Mongols must have become a new hot topic in the field of translation studies in China.The Secret History of the Mongols,with its imposing cultural exoticness,is likely to pose difficulties for its translators.Due to disparities between the two languages as well as cultural contexts,it is necessary for the translator to take some compensatory measures to complete the conversion of the source language into the target one in the course of its English translation.The thick translation proposed by Appiah offers us its help in this very respect.Thick translation advocates heavy use of critical apparatus,such as footnotes,end notes and graphs,to convey the cultural otherness in the source text and enhance the receptive effect of the target text.Among the 11 English renderings of The Secret History of the Mongols,the three unabridged versions by Cleave,by de Rachewiltz and by Onon respectively,are typical academic-oriented ones.All of them demonstrate obvious features of thick translation such as commentaries and various kinds of annotations,and they differ from one another in their choice and emphasis of specific devices.The thesis closely examines the different forms of thick translation embodied in de Rachewiltz and compares them with forms of thick translation in Cleave and Onon so as to define the linguistic context in which thick translation is effectively applied to the translation practice of the book.In other words,the thesis is a comparative study of three translators' strategies which seems rather similar to thick translation theory of later time,with an emphasis on classification of thick translation strategies and analysis of their respective functions,advantages and disadvantages.The comparative study discovers that among the many English versions,the translation by Igor de Rachewiltz embodies the largest number of thick translation techniques and conveys the greatest amount of cultural information from the ST to the TT.Marked by a perfect combination of thick translation devices(especially notes and commentaries)and fluent text of modern English,the book's academic value,in fact,has far surpassed that of a mere translation.The version by Cleave,with its strict literal translation complemented by precise,detailed footnotes,is really indispensable as a reference material for in-depth studies.The rendering by Onon has achieved its thick translation goal with its copious footnotes,and meanwhile manifests its unique features of the translator's subjective identity as an insider of the source culture and the meticulous perception of such subjectivity.On the whole,the English translation by de Rachewiltz,which vividly dramatizes the theory of thick translation and thus provides a new method and perspective for foreign translation of classics of the ethnic group under concern,is a paragon of thick translation theory and thereby of undeniable guiding significance.