Issues On Tourist Publicity Translation

Issues on Tourist Publicity TranslationMa Jin-feng, M. A.Shanghai Maritime University, 2003Thesis Director: Dr. Wang Jian-kaiOn the basis of the writer's vast reading on numerous articles about Chinese-English tourist publicity translation and her personal investigation on large quantities of English tourist publicity translated from Chinese, she ventures to list some principles and techniques for the translation of Chinese tourist publicity into English in the hope of offering a helpful note to the future translating practice in this field and to the improvement of English tourist publicity materials.This dissertation is composed of 6 chapters. The first chapter functions as an introduction to the complete dissertation. Chapter 2 gives a brief introduction to written publicity in the tourist industry, including classification and functions as a whole.As this dissertation is mainly concerned with the Chinese-English translation of tourist publicity, Chapter 3 provides a contrastive study of linguistic characteristics and cultural features represented in tourist publicity in both languages. Linguistic characteristics are covered separately in two aspects: style and discourse. Cultural differences shown in tourist literatures may be categorized as differences in cultural psychology, moral concepts and ethics, aesthetic values and mode of thinking, custom and conventions, historical culture. All these discussions stem from the author's exhaustive investigation and study, so that the reader may obtain a general view on linguistic and cultural features as reference in tourism translation.In the fourth part, the author, based on the functional theory of language proposed by E.A. Nida and P. Newmark, and the latter's translation theory in respect of communicative and semantic, develops her own general principles for translating Chinese tourist publicity, which put great emphasis on the acceptability of target language, conciseness of information transmission, richness in aesthetic values as well as cultural connotations. Under such guiding principles, different translating methods are drawn out as equaltranslation and adapted translation (such as over-translation, under-translation, epitomized translation). A detailed discussion is also made regarding frequently employed techniques for translating four-character structure, rhetoric devices as well as allusions from Chinese to English tourist publicity. Meanwhile, the author puts aside an detailed discussion over the syntactic techniques in such translating process, such as supplementation of subject, conversion between passive and active voices, and other techniques concerned with linguistic parataxis and hypotaxis. As a last resort, the author put forward several compensative techniques for untranslatablity in tourist publicity translation, which, in this respect, may provide translators with some assistance.In the last chapter of the main body, the author categorizes existing problems widely found in current tourism translation, such as those violating the guiding principles for tourism translation, and other preliminary mistakes. The former is discussed in 3 aspects: un-naturalness in TL representation, failure to achieve informative conveyance, faithfulness to the source text and failure to represent cultural connotation. The latter mainly results from the negligence of translators or proofreaders. Then a brief conclusion draws an end to the dissertation.