The aim of this project is to analyse plot elements and word choices in Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Reeve’s Tale” from his greater work, The Canterbury Tales, and compare them to those used in a similar story from Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, Day 9, Story 6 in order to determine if there are enough similar elements between the two stories to infer that Chaucer could have been familiar with Boccaccio’s version of the tale when writing “The Reeve’s Tale . The paper also addresses the question of whether or not Chaucer “merely translated” his source text into English and, if so, what the act of translating really means. Nida’s concept of translation styles (specifically whether one uses to domesticize or forenize a work through their translation) defines translation for this paper and serves as the basis for how Chaucer can be interpreted as having been a translator, of sorts, when writing his own works
