Functionalist Approaches Applied To Tourism Translation

The booming international tourism industry in China has given rise to the need of well-translated tourist texts to provide quality traveling information for foreign tourists and attract more foreign people to travel to China. This has given C-E tourism translation a role of paramount importance. However, the existing situation is that many English versions of Chinese tourist texts are far from satisfactory and fail to achieve the function as intended. Therefore, C-E tourism translation deserves an in-depth study.As C-E Tourism translation aims at providing traveling information for foreign people and arousing their interest to visit a certain tourist destination in China, the intended function of the target text in the target situation is a key factor that the translator has to keep in mind in the translation process. Therefore, studying C-E tourism translation in the light of text function(s) shall be of great help to translation practice. Theories including German Skopos Theory, Nida's principle of dynamic/functional equivalence and Newmark's text-type classifications and semantic vs. communicative translation all provide very useful guidelines for tourism translation, although they are different by nature and vary in their role of guiding translation practice.Considering the fact that most of the scenic attractions in Fujian province are little known to the outside world and there are few studies on Fujian tourism translation, the author attempts, by applying relevant theories, to probe into the status of Fujian tourism translation through case studies to seek effective ways of improving the translation quality of Fujian tourist texts.Based on an analysis of many examples, the author comes to a conclusion: functionalist approaches, particularly Skopos Theory, are useful to guide C-E tourism translation. In the translation process, the translator is required to bear in mind the intended function of the target text and produce a version that is comprehensible and acceptable to the target reader. Owing to great differences in language and culture, the translation process usually involves considerable adjustments or adaptations of the source text in order to achieve the intended function of the target text.