《克里米亚战争》(The Crimean War: A History )
- Submitting institution
-
University of Aberdeen
- Unit of assessment
- 26 - Modern Languages and Linguistics
- Output identifier
- 176008800
- Type
- T - Other
- DOI
-
-
- Location
- Nanjing
- Brief description of type
- Nanjing University Press
- Open access status
- -
- Month
- January
- Year
- 2018
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
-
1
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- My co-translator and I were drawn to Orlando Figes’s The Crimean War soon after it was published in October 2010 for its subject matter and writing style. Two months later, we published a review in China, possibly the first review of this book in Chinese. Readers in China are highly interested in Russian history but are largely unfamiliar with the Crimean War, despite its long-lasting impact on the modern societies in the region which is still felt in the present day. This is mainly due to a lack of literature on the subject matter in Chinese. We also chose to translate the book because Figges combines broad narratives with personal eyewitness accounts. This is rare in Chinese historical writing. We thought that a Chinese translation of the book would not only benefit historians, scholars and researchers but also the general public. We aimed for an accurate transfer of the military, geographical and topographical terminology, and an appropriate transliteration of the vast number of Arabic, English, French and Russian proper nouns. We aimed at a dynamic equivalence of the cultural information, especially the emotion and voice contained in the personal accounts. To achieve this, we read a large amount of published works about the war in English, studied historical maps, and consulted historians including the author himself to appreciate various aspects of the period and the course of the war. Our research also enabled us to write a commentary on the impact of the war and the author’s writing, included as the last part of the Chinese translation. The original book has 624 pages with approximately 200,000 words. Our Chinese translation, which was published in 2018 and re-printed in 2020, is 717 pages in length with 640,000 Chinese characters.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- Yes
- English abstract
- This work is a Chinese translation of The Crimean War: A History accompanied by a critical essay by the translators. In this book, British historian Orlando Figes argues that the Crimean War (1853-1856) was a consequence of religious conflicts as well as geopolitics and long-held mutual suspicion. The book was selected for its subject matter and its combination of grand narratives with eyewitness’s accounts – neither had been well explored in Chinese historical writings. This translation is the only major work on the Crimean War published in China, as part of the prestigious Mirror series of translated books.