Culture is the sum of spiritual wealth created by human beings, of which ethnic culture is an important part. Assisted by ChineseEnglish Parallel Corpus of Mao Dun Prize Works, this paper investigates the diachronic characteristics of ethnic culture translation in contemporary ethnicthemed novels: The Jade King, Red Poppies, and Last Quarter of the Moon at three levels: marriage and funeral customs, religious fete, ethnic legends and history. The study shows that the information of ethnic culture in the translation presents a transition from deletion to retention over time, and ethnic culture gradually gets more reserved and reproduced. This tendency is mainly caused by three factors: the change of readers’ demand under globalization background, the change of Chinese and Western translation strategies, and the difference of translators’ subjectivity.