Faithfulness As A Guiding Principle In Long Sentence Translation

"Faithfulness" has always been the most important principle of translation. When it comes to literary translation, the translators should be faithful not only to the meaning but also to the style of the original work. The difficulty of achieving faithfulness is particularly reflected in the translation of long English sentences. Taking faithfulness as the guiding principle, this thesis illustrates the use of the translation methods of Zhang Peiji, a Chinese scholar, in the translation of two excerpted chapters of Mark Twain's novel The American Claimant. By referring to and comparing with the previous Chinese version of this book, the present author has realized that, faithfulness can not be achieved simply by adhering to the original word sequence. Rather, the inner sentence structures should be clarified and a flexible reorganization of sentences should be produced before a faithful translation comes into being. In the concluding part, some suggestions, together with the four points of research limit, have been given.