Volume 3,Issue 8
Cognitive Complements in Urgunge Onon’s “The Secret History of the Mongols: The Life and Times of Chinggis Khan”
As a highly controversial book, “The Secret History of the Mongols”, remains the only available account of the life of Chinggis Khan and plays an important role in studying Mongolian history and culture. Its original Uighurjin Mongol script has long been lost but it still has been translated into various languages including English, Japanese, French, etc. Passed down by word of mouth, the book is compiled with unavoidable narrative inaccuracies. However, Urgunge Onon, based on his Mongolian cultural background and overseas experience, investigated a variety of documents and then translated and edited his own version, “The Secret History of the Mongols: The Life and Times of Chinggis Khan”. In his translation and interpretation, examples of cognitive complements can be found in every chapter to bridge cultural and cognitive gaps for target readers. As Onon expects to introduce his own Mongolian culture to the rest of the world, it’s necessary for him to act as a “cultural interpreter”. To achieve this goal, cognitive complements work effectively, which in his book mainly consist of interpretive translation of cultural memes of proper nouns, dynamically equivalent interpretation of culturally specific concepts and poetic reshaping of the narrative style. In this way, Onon reconstructs a Mongolian nomadic epic within the English-speaking world. This paper mainly illustrates how Onon applies cognitive complements with examples from his first three chapters.
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