Heritage in Translation: “A Dagur Story” as Historical Fiction and Sample Text for Learning Manchu: Part Two

This article follows the one in Volume 13 of this journal. It further explains the challenges of translating into English and Chinese A Dagur Story, a Manchu-language historical fiction about the Dagur tribe’s activities in the anti-Russian campaigns in Qing territory during the seventeenth century. It comprises the Romanized transliteration, Chinese translation, and English translation of three excerpts of the novel selected by the authors, and also the authors’ commentaries on the trilingual translation. The major issues addressed in the commentaries include the Chinese and English translations of proper nouns, the semantic and grammatical issues regarding the Manchu-Chinese and Manchu-English translations, and the discrepancies between the Chinese and English translated texts as well as the rationales behind the difference.

本文是本期刊第十三期論文的下半部，進一步探討翻譯達斡爾故事時所遇到的挑戰。（達斡爾故事是一部滿文歷史小說，講述十七世紀達斡爾人如何抵抗俄羅斯人入侵清領土。）本文包括三段摘錄段落的羅馬化音譯，中英文翻譯，以及作者對三語翻譯的意見。意見的部分主要涉及專有名詞的翻譯，關於滿中、滿英翻譯的語意和文法問題，以及中英文譯本的相異之處和背後的原因。