A Report On The Short Story Translation Of The Story Of A Lie

Robert Louis Stevenson was a famous neo-romantic writer in English literature, who had proved a dominant force in the development of British short story. This is a report on translating Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story—The Story of a Lie. The principle of equivalent effect proposed by Eugene A. Nida is adopted as the theoretical basis in this translation practice. The author attempts to figure out appropriate strategies to the difficulties that occurred in the translation process under the guidance of the said theory.This report mainly discusses three major difficulties in the course of translating the original story from English to Chinese:how to choose proper words, how to deal with long and complex sentences and how to handle the rhetorical devices in this short story. The author analyzes the difficulties at the lexical, syntactic and rhetorical levels and then discusses how to adopt adequate translation methods and strategies to achieve the maximal equivalence, so to enable the receptors of the translated text to understand and appreciate the rending in almost the same way as the original readers do.At the lexical level, methods like the selection of the meaning and conversion of parts of the speech are found to contribute to achieving the equivalent effect. At the syntactic level, it is revealed that the methods of converting the sentence form and readjusting the sentence structure without sticking to the original surface structure can achieve the same effect. At the rhetorical level, the study results indicate that the translator may not only convey the meaning of the original text, but also reproduce the original text’s style. In a word, according to the features of both source and target languages and on the basis of the principle of equivalent effect, proper adoption of translation methods of changing the form of original language can make the translation more faithfully reproduce the meaning and style of the source text and make it more acceptable and comprehensible.