Shamanistic Religious Narratives in English Translation: A Study of Evenki Shamanic Elements in Bruce Humes’s Translation of The Last Quarter of the Moon

Abstract

The Last Quarter of the Moon is a classic work of contemporary Chinese ethnic minority literature. It chronicles the century-long migration history of the Evenki hunting tribe and richly incorporates the religious narratives of Evenki shamanism. Its English translation has gained wide recognition overseas; however, current research lacks a specialized investigation into how these shamanistic religious narratives have been rendered in English. The present study focuses on Humes’s English translation of The Last Quarter of the Moon. Through comparative textual analysis, it examines the translator’s strategies from three dimensions: deity names, sacrificial rituals, and cosmology. The findings show that Humes adopted different translation strategies depending on the type of religious elements. For shamanistic deity names, he combined transliteration with annotation or literal translation to preserve local cultural symbols. For ritual and religious object descriptions, he used cultural addition and semantic explicitation to address overseas readers’ cognitive gaps. For metaphors that embody Evenki shamanistic cosmology and views of life and death, he avoided assimilating them into western religious imagery, retaining the original metaphorical expressions. Taken together, these strategies balance cultural authenticity with reader acceptability, accurately conveying the essence of Evenki shamanism while offering a reference for translating ethnic religious literature into English.