Kychanov’s Study of the Tiansheng Law from the Perspective of Vocabulary Translation and Interpretation

Kychanov’s translation and interpretation of the Tiansheng Law is the accumulation of decades of his research and a landmark work in Tangut scholarship. Working with a legal code without any reference text, the author faced the biggest challenge from numerous Tangut technical terms. Kychanov’s profound scholarly skills are evident in the Russian translation of the vocabulary, his grasp of the East Asian medieval laws and his comparative study of the Chinese legal code texts. On the whole, the author’s translation of legal texts is groundbreaking, even though his translation contains some problems of mistranslation. However, the defects do not outweigh the merits, and this work is still worthy of study and reference by current scholars.