A Report On The Translation Of Mountain Ways

Mountain Ways, as a science fiction novel of Le Guin’s, presents a story that happens on Planet O, which is an imaginary world. On that mountain area, a normal marital system contains four persons who come from two different moieties----the Morning and the Evening, and such a marital system has a name of sedoretu. The author presents a description of two women, Shahes and Akal, who fall in love with each other, but if so, they cannot establish a sedoretu according to the local custom. Therefore, they finally decide to disguise one of them as a man to both obey the tradition and satisfy their desires. After a series of struggle and quarrel, it ends unexpectedly.This story is mainly composed of two parts: the first part is an introduction of the environment where the main character lives, and the second one describes the process how the two women struggle for their marriage against the traditional rules. The main characteristic of this story is to employ many a terse and concise expression. In addition, a lot of dialogues and psychological description have been utilized by the author in this story. Therefore, during translation, many difficulties will be encountered such as how to translate those terse but implied expressions, the ways to deal with neologies and how to maintain both the author’s writing style and its real meaning. In the following chapters, the report will discuss all the difficulties encountered in different aspects.This report draws a conclusion that a flexible method of translation should be employed during the translation process, and the translator should concern not only the acceptability of target readers, but also the author’s writing styles. Therefore, this report, associated with many translation theories and strategies, advocates the translator should offer a creative translation so that the readers from the target language will get the same response like the readers from the source language.