A Report On The Translation Of The Mystery Queen

This report is based on the author’s translation practice of The Mystery Queen written by an Australian detective novelist Fergus Hume. The main plot and characters are as follows:Miss Armour, leader of a criminal gang, designed to kill a millionaire for power and money. Dan, a detective, finally found her crimes and disbanded the gang through a series of investigations. The enemy was defeated in the end. The Mystery Queen has 90,000 words with 21 chapters. The author undertakes the translation of Chapter One, Chapter Seven and Chapter Twenty.This novel has several language features such as the employment of ambiguous words, long and complicated sentences and various metaphors. Accordingly, in the process of translation, the author met with three difficulties. The first was how to effectively convey some connotative meaning; The second was how to translate long sentences with complicated structures so as to make the target version smooth and logical. The last was how to reproduce the figurative images and meaning. The above three difficulties concentrate on how to effectively reproduce the original story of the novel. Since Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory focuses on readers’ response and the reproduction of the closest natural equivalent of the message that source language convey, it could be used as the guiding theory of this detective fiction. Through the application of this theory to the translation practice of The Mystery Queen written by Fergus Hume, this report discovers some useful strategies which can be adopted to achieve lexical equivalence, syntactic and stylistic equivalence between the source text and the target text. At lexical level, the report analyzes how to translate difficult words. At syntactic level, it sums up strategies of translating long sentences, such as embedding, cutting, reversing, converting, combing of different methods. Then, it discusses how to translate figures of speech vividly. The author also hopes that it might be of some help to later translations of detective novels.