Approaching Tour Commentary Translation From The Perspective Of Intercultural Communication

The ultimate purpose of translation is to meet social demand, which signifies that the development of translation theory and practice should be towards the direction of intercultural communication translation. The nature of translation determines that translation is doomed to facilitate intercultural communication activities. Researches on translation should aim at solving realistic problems and guide the translation practice in the right direction so as to maximally avoid any intercultural communication failures.As a typical intercultural communication activity, global tourism prevails year by year, which consequently creates the new hit academic research field of tourist translation. Domestic translation scholars have ahready made some discussions on this topic, most of which are targeted at written translation of tourist materials. They seldom regard tour commentary translation as a separate research target. The fact that tour commentary is quite different from common tourist materials has been neglected though it is closely related to the latter. Actually, tour commentary acquires some characteristics of interpretation while it is produced on the basis of studying written tour materials. This thesis tries to approach C/E tour commentary translation from the perspective of intercultural communication by analyzing the existing problems in this field and tracking their root causes out. It makes a tentative study on the translation criteria and strategies for this particular type of text. Cases have been chosen from some most representative resources, taking the book of "Touring China——Selected Tour Commentary" for an example, to prove the former analysis. This thesis aims at attracting more attention from the translation circle to be placed on tour commentary translation so that a joint effort could be made to improve the existing translated English versions of Chinese tour commentary. By accurately transmitting Chinese cultural information in the tourist resources to foreign tourists, communication failures between foreign tourists and Chinese culture can be reduced to a minimum and Chinese culture will exert more influence in the world. The thesis consists of six chapters in all. The first chapter introduces some former relevant studies and the methodology of conducting the research here. The second chapter offers some basic knowledge on tour commentary and makes it clear that C/E tour commentary translation is the research target of the thesis. The following chapter illustrates on intercultural communication and translation respectively and goes on to illustrate on Skopos theory and relevance translation theory, which serves as the theoretical foundation of the whole thesis. Chapter four deals with the link between tour commentary translation and intercultural communication. The particular nature of tour commentary translation is emphasized and translation criteria or techniques for it are discussed. Chapter five makes a study on the existing problems of tour commentary translation, summarizes their root causes out and employs the introduced theories in Chapter three into discussion as theoretical solutions to those problems. The last chapter draws the conclusion for the thesis: Given the particularity of tour commentary text type and the spirit of preserving Chinese cultural information, translator should adopt "foreignization" as the dominant translation strategy in its translating process and make a balance among correct transmission of source Chinese cultural information, the principle of being tourist-oriented and keeping translator's subjectivity status. It is impossible for translators to manage it without the acquisition and development of intercultural awareness.