A Report On The Translation Of Time,Causality And Prophecy In The Mongolian Cultural Region(Chapter 5)

This translation report is based on the translation of Time,Causality and Prophecy in the Mongolian Cultural Region.The selected part for translation is Chapter 5 Recalling Past Futures:The Property of Oral Prophecies and Lay-prophet.As a matter of fact,prophecies and prophets are well-known in every culture.In Egypt,diviners formed a special class;in Babylon,they were consulted by rulers about the important state affairs.Taking two prophets in Mongolian cultural region as an example,Chapter 5 mainly discusses the oral prophecies circulated among the particular groups.The original writer holds the opinion that prophecy,recognized as a form of non-material property,is carefully protected by the particular groups.In addition,it also provides a way in which people can recall the past and imagine the future.In translation,the difficulties the translator meets are mainly from vocabulary and sentence.About vocabulary,it is hard to find suitable counterparts for some terminologies and it is hard to translate common words with special meanings.As for sentences,attributive clause and some other long sentences require some special translation strategies.The translator deals with the vocabularies in the original book by means of the following strategies:the shift of word class,the extension of word meaning and the application of Chinese four-character phrases.About the sentences,the translator in most cases follows the original syntactic order.In some cases the translator rearranges the sentence structure and adopts amplification in order to reproduce the information of the original text faithfully and meet the needs of target readers.Through this translation practice,the translator realizes that it is not a simple task to apply the translation theories into practice.Due to her limited knowledge,the translator still needs to make improvements.A correct and good understanding of the source text is the prerequisite for translation.Readability of the target text is a requirement for a good translation.All of these require the translator should be well equipped with both good Chinese and English language foundations.Only in the process of translating,can translators raise their level of translation and improve their translation skills.