Translation Of Chinese Tourism Texts Into English: A Functional Perspective

The English translation of Chinese tourism texts has the function of promoting tourism products and attracting more foreign visitors. It plays a vital role in the expansion of international tourism markets and the development of China's economy. This thesis is concerned with the translation of landscape description and cultural elements in tourism texts from a functional perspective. At present, the quality of translations of tourism texts from Chinese into English is far from satisfactory and is therefore in dire need of improvement. A lot of translation problems and errors can be found in tourism texts. This author has collected numerous tourism texts from various scenic spots in China and has built a corpus for this research project. By classifying the translation problems and errors at three levels, i.e. diction, sentence and text, and analyzing them in depth, the author hopes this study can provide some insight and practical suggestions to tourism text translators.It is said that the predominant purpose of the translation of tourism texts is to stimulate the potential tourist's motivation to buy a particular tourism product. To achieve this goal, the translator of tourism texts must be able to expose target readers to the cultural foreignness. The author draws heavily upon Skopostheorie when dealing with the issue of tourism text translation. According to Skopostheorie, the translator should take into account target readers'expectations. Skopostheorie is in this study regarded as the most effective theory in guiding highly purpose-driven tourism text translation.As far as translation of landscape description in tourism texts is concerned, we should first consider differences between styles of Chinese and English tourism texts. According to Skopostheorie, the author proposes that translation of landscape description in tourism texts should stick to the following principles: (1) use words that are as concise and specific as possible; (2) delete quotations and allusions in the source text; (3) delete subjective expressions and information irrelevant to imagery-building; (4) change the pattern of the source text to a linear point of view in the target text. When dealing with culture-loaded words, translators often adopt the method of foreignization. Through comparing domestication and foreignization, the author proposes that the translator should employ foreignization to retain cultural foreignness. When the translation method of foreignization is adopted, the translator should make some necessary compensation to help the target reader understand the target text. In the light of the tourist-oriented principle and bearing in mind the task of promoting Chinese culture, the author put forward some practical strategies in the translation of Chinese tourism texts into English.