Translation Of The Cultural Load And Imagery In Chinese Tourism Texts: A Functional Perspective

The author, bearing in mind the predominant purpose of tourism translation, i.e., to stimulate the potential tourists' motivation to buy a particular targeted tourism product, by resorting to Skopostheorie, probes into the translation of the cultural load and imagery in Chinese tourism texts.After an analysis of the tourism motivators of potential tourists, the author, proceeding from the view that one of the motivators of potential tourists is to experience new cultures and according to one of the views in Skopostheorie that the translator should take into account such factors as the target readers' "expectations and their communicative needs" (Christiane Nord, 2001: 12), decides that, the translator, in order to stimulate the potential tourists' motivation to buy a targeted tourism product, should treat the cultural load or foreignness in such a way as to enable the target readers to see in the translation the cultural foreignness. By comparing domestication and foreignization, the author argues that the translator, in order to retain the cultural foreignness, should adopt foreignization, including literal translation and transliteration. Then, the author holds that, since translation is an "intercultural action" and thus cultural default or cultural vacuum may arise when foreignization is adopted, necessary compensations such as annotation, amplification and analogy should be made so that the target reader can bridge the cultural gap. Of course, according to Skopostheorie, the cultural load considered inadequate to the translation purpose of stimulating the target readers' interest should be deleted.The author, based on one of the tourism motivators of enjoying natural scenery, holds that stimulating potential tourists' motivation depends not only on...