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

Abstract

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.