| Tourist brochures are one of the important tools used by tourism industry in the competition to attract tourists. With the booming of China's international tourism, translation of tourist brochures has developed rapidly. However, most Chinese-English translation of tourist brochures is problematic and has plenty of room for improvement. Improving the translation quality needs a theoretical guidance. Skopostheorie was developed to meet the growing needs of translating non-literary text types in the 1970's. Tourist brochure falls into this category and thus fits for a new try-out of Skopostheorie. Therefore, the thesis is attempted to check whether the Chinese-English translation of tourist brochures will be improved under the guidance of Skopostheorie.According to Skopostheorie, the prospective function or Skopos of the target text determines the translation process. Furthermore,"it is the reception that defines the function of the text, so it is safe to say that the reception of the target text defines the Skopos of the translation"(Nord, 2005, p. 17). According to Nord (2005),"receivers'reaction or response to the text takes place after text reception"(p. 60). Therefore, receivers'reaction or response to the text may shed a light on text reception in one way or another.The theoretical foundation inspires the author to study from two aspects. First, the author analyzed the commission and text functions on the whole with Chongqing tourist brochures as an example to present the Skopos and text functions of Chinese-English translation of tourist brochures, summarized the major translation errors in tourist brochures which failed to fulfill the Skopos and text functions and presented the proposed retranslations for each type of translation errors in light of Skopostheorie. Second, the author designed and administered a questionnaire to check the applicability of Skopostheorie to Chinese-English translation of tourist brochures and the effectiveness of improving the translation by investigating readers'responses toward the retranslated versions.The author found that the main translation errors in Chinese-English translation of tourist brochures were pragmatic translation errors, cultural translation errors and linguistic translation errors. They were further discussed. Each sub-error of these three main translation errors had at least typical example in the questionnaire titled"The Readers'Response to C-E Translation of Chongqing Tourist Brochure". The questionnaire was mainly made up of 13 Chinese sentences and pairs of their translations: one was the original translation; the other was adapted under the guidance of Skopostheorie. 40 completed questionnaires were collected. The author analyzed the intratextual coherence and the intertextual coherence of the retranslations from foreign readers and Chinese readers respectively and checked whether those retranslations followed the Skopos rule. It showed that most retranslations were accepted by the readers and they were in accordance with the Skopos rule.It can be mainly drawn from the research that Skopostheorie offers functional and receiver-oriented perspectives for Chinese-English translation of tourist brochures and can be applied to guide Chinese-English translation of tourist brochures. In addition, the translation quality can be improved by taking text reception into consideration. Furthermore, it may suggest that the Skopos rule is one of the most important criteria in judging the quality of Chinese-English translation of tourist brochures. |
