A Study Of The Chinese-English Translation Of Mount Tai Tourism Literature

As a window for foreign tourists, tourism literature is of great importance to the development of tourism industry and idiomatic tourism translation is increasingly significant accordingly. Nowadays, many experts and scholars conduct studies on this field, but limitations still exist in many aspects such as methodology, investigated subject and research perspective, etc.. Based on previous studies, this thesis will probe into translation of tourism literature in the light of functional translation theory with practical analysis of tourism literature collected from Mount Tai.According to functional translation theory, translation depends on text function, translation purpose, translation brief and main participants of translational activity like initiator, translator, and target text receiver. The author first conducts an analysis of tourism literature from these aspects, and finds that: 1) Tourism literature belongs to a compound-text type. Their predominant function is operative, while the informative and expressive functions play a subsidiary role. 2) Translation of tourism literature is a purposeful activity, which aims at advertising Chinese tourism resources and culture, attracting potential foreign tourists and promoting the development of tourism industry. 3) Not only skopos of translation but also such factors as demand of initiator, expectation of target text receiver and medium should be taken into consideration by translator.The translation of tourism literature is not only a code-switching of two languages but also an intercultural communication activity. This study compares cultural differences between Chinese and English tourism literature, including different motives, aesthetic conventions, religion and customs as well as thinking modes, which results in different writing styles between Chinese and English tourism literature and different reading habits of their each native reader. Additionally, comparison of linguistic features like style and content are conducted on collected data. It is concluded that Chinese tourism literature tends to employ flowery diction, rhetoric devices, abundant quotations and changing angle of view to describe mental pictures, while English ones are always organized in a concise and informal way as well as consistent angle of view and objective description. For those differences, translator is expected to take features of English tourism literature into full consideration during the process of translation.Major translation problems and errors of Mount Tai tourism literature can be categorized into linguistic translation errors, pragmatic translation errors and cultural translation errors with subordinate categories of each kind. Generally speaking, linguistic translation errors can be mainly classified into misspelling, poor diction and word redundancy; pragmatic translation errors mainly include word-for-word translation, wrong structure, politeness and non-uniform expression; cultural translation errors often happen for English versions are always composed in a stereotyped way for differences of culture such as cover-all contents and formal style, flowery diction and so on. The author probes into causes of those translation errors, which lie in misunderstanding between translation theory and practice, negative influence of Chinese conventions and remissness of translators. In a word, target readers'reading habits or expectations aren't expressed idiomatically.The English translation of tourism literature should follow certain translation principle and evaluation standard to highlight its quality. The author holds that translation of tourism literature should adopt tourists-centered principle, culture-orientation principle and adequacy criterion to guarantee the acceptability and readability of the English version. In view of the above analysis and the reality of Mount Tai, Such translation strategies as translation couplet, paraphrase, amplification, omission, remolding and rewriting are much available during the process of translating. For example, Translation couplet is the best way to translate the name of scenic spots in Mount Tai; Remolding vividly expresses the cliff inscription culture of Mount Tai to the utmost extent. Meanwhile, the integrated use of these strategies can help the translator make the translation cater for taste of foreign tourists and achieve intended function of tourism literature.