A Report On The Translation Of Conquest Of Mexico(Excerpts)

This translation report is selected from American historian William Hickling Prescott’s History of the Conquest of Mexico(excerpts),and summarizes the strategies and methods of translating historical texts in which literary content is prevalent.Three difficulties exist in the translation of the selected text.To begin with,it is difficult to address challenges in translation due to variations in space,time,information context,and other variables,as the book was published decades earlier.Secondly,it is difficult to suppress,emphasize,or explain the implicit narration of the original text because of the variations on Chinese and English.Finally,the choice of register in the source language,as well as the exact location of referent objects,are also major translation challenges.So the author analyzed the difficulties in translation from three aspects: the translation of culture-loaded words under temporal and spatial framing,the compensation of historical background default under re-positioning of participants,and historical narrative gestures under selective appropriation framing.To solve the reading obstacles created by varying time and place,the author reconstructed the story by inserting footnotes or in-text annotation firstly.Secondly,the author has bridged the division between authorship,translator,and readers by re-positioning the register of the deixis within the text.Finally,the text’s selective narrative logic is realized,undermining or explaining any of the original text’s narration.