An E-C Translation Report On Daily Life In The Mongol Empire (Chapter 9)

This is an English-Chinese translation report.The selected text of the translation practice is from Chapter 9 of Daily Life in the Mongol Empire written by George Lane.This book focuses on the daily life of the ordinary Mongols under the rule of Genghis khan and his descendants,including food,clothing,dwellings,religion,law,military and many other aspects.Chapter 9,“Religion and the Mongols”,gives a detailed account of the main religious cultures that existed during the reign of the Mongols,which contained Shamanism,Christianity and Islam.This report first gives a brief introduction to the background,significance of the translation project as well as the translation process and then analyzes the content and characteristics of the original text.The selected text is a historical book,involving a large amount of historical and cultural content,and the language style is relatively rigorous,so it is difficult to understand the text.During the process of translating,the difficulties encountered at the lexical level mainly focus on translating proper nouns and culture-specific words;at the syntactic level,the difficulties primarily concentrate on translating attributive clauses,sentences with parentheses and long sentences.In view of the difficulties existing in the source text,the translator chose different translation techniques to settle them.The translation techniques adopted at the lexical level are as follows:(1)translating proper nouns in the text is determined by referring to the parallel texts,and some difficult words are explained by the method of annotation;(2)transliteration is adopted for the proper nouns without corresponding Chinese;(3)the technique of semantic extension is used to translate the culture-specific words.At the syntactic level,the following techniques are employed:(1)preposition and postposition are used in translating attributive clauses;(2)putting the parentheses in the front or in a bracket is utilized to deal with the sentences with parentheses;(3)division and recasting are adopted to translate the long English sentences.Finally,the report summarizes the translator's implications from thetranslation and the limitations of the translation.The translation of Daily Life in the Mongol Empire(Chapter 9)can provide a reference for the study of the Mongols' religious culture.