An English-Chinese Translation Report On A Short History Of The Mongols(Chapters 3-4)

This is an English-Chinese translation report,the source text of which is selected from Chapter Three and Chapter Four of A Short History of the Mongols,published in2018 and written by British scholar George Lane.The two chapters,“Out from the Steppe” and “The Tread of Tatar Hoof”,are mainly about Chinggis Khan’s conquest of Xixia,China and Khwarazm,the process of the rise and decline of the Golden Horde,as well as the Great Khans who came to power in different periods.A Short History of the Mongols is an academic monograph on Mongolian history,and it is relatively difficult to be translated.The selected source text has 20,487 words,and the target text is at 34,109 characters.This translation report introduces George Lane and the main content of the text,describes the process of translation in detail,explains the difficulties encountered in the translation process,and uses different translation methods to solve the difficulties.In the process of translation,the main translation difficulties include the translation of Mongolian historical terms and culture-loaded words,the translation of long sentences and how to deal with the problem of cohesion in translation.For the difficulties above,this report puts forward the following methods:(1)transliteration with annotation,paraphrase and conversion at the lexical level;(2)division,reversing and restructuring at the syntactic level;(3)repetition and ellipsis at the textual level.Through translating Chapter Three and Chapter Four of A Short History of the Mongols,the translator’s English-Chinese translation ability has been improved.In addition,the translation of this text not only helps target readers to have an in-depth understanding on Mongolian history,but also can be for other translators’ information when translating Mongolian historical texts.