An Analysis Of English Translation Of Tourism Signs In Xi'an

The booming international tourism industry has given rise to the need of well-translated tourism signs to provide effective information for foreign tourists in China. Meanwhile, translating Chinese tourism signs into English is essential to the development of international tourism of China. This has given C-E tourism sign translation a role of paramount importance. Through the thesis, much attention should be paid to the C-E tourism sign translation.The thesis consists of five parts. Chapter 1 gives a brief introduction of the history of tourism sign translation, including the current situation of the tourism sign translation in China, the purpose and significance of research on them, the necessity and urgency to translate them into English.Chapter 2 is an analysis on tourism sign translation, its importance, its classification, and its characteristics.Chapter 3 studies the sign translation errors in a typical tourism city of China -Xi'an. The problems that exist in the C-E tourism sign translation can be classified into two main parts: the problems that the translation is wrong and badly needs correcting, and the problems that the translation can be improved.Chapter 4 states the translation theories and their enlightenment to the tourism sign translation. The useful translation theories include German Skopos theory, Nida's functional equivalence, Newmark's semantic vs. communicative translation, and Venuti's foreignization/domestication. Among all the translation theories will be discussed here, German Skopos theory plays the most important role in dealing with the C-E tourism sign translation. The rest of the theories here are the effective assistance to solving some certain problems that appear in the C-E tourism sign translation.Chapter 5 discusses the strategies that are applicable to tourism sign translation: paraphrase, supplement, analogy, rearrangement, and suitable mood on the basis of considerable examples.To sum up, the importance of the C-E tourism sign translation is very obvious. Some strategies are listed in the thesis, but there is still a long way to go in this field.