A Study Of Chinese-English Translation Of Tour Guides' Commentaries-A Relevance Theory Approach

The booming international tourism brings large number of tourists to the mainland of China. On the way of the tour, tour interpreters offer comprehensive presentation of the local customs, cultural and historical background, geographical features, anecdotes about personages, etc. thus entertaining and educating the tourists. However, such kind of high-quality service is rare for the lack of qualified tour guides and commentaries. Different from other types of tourism literature, translators of tour guides' commentaries have to take various contextual elements into consideration and should aim to guarantee on-the-spot effect and tourists' immediate appreciation.This paper, first of all, gives an in-depth discourse analysis at the macro-level of tour guides' commentaries on the basis of Nord's discourse analysis model, which makes the following study more purposeful. And then, Relevance Theory raised by Sperber and Wilson is utilized to explain the Chinese-English translation of guides' commentaries at the micro-level. RT claims that optimal relevance is achieved with the best contextual effect plus the least processing effort. It is the same with tour guides' commentaries. Accordingly, in the last part, this thesis puts forward a set of relatively practicable translation strategies and tactics for the C-E translation of this special discourse. It is hoped that the current qualitative research can help out those troubled tour interpreters and devote certain share to the practical translation of China.