Genre Analysis Of Chinese And British Travel Brochures

Travel brochures, as a subgenre of advertisements, are growing significant for foreign tourists to know about China's unique tourism resources and cultures, meanwhile they are the most important message carriers between travel products and potential customers. But few of their studies were conducted from a generic point of view. This paper firstly uses the genre analysis theory to identify the generic structures of the travel brochures. And then a comparative analysis of BTBs and CTBs is conducted to reveal why there are differences between them; their characteristics are examined to shed light on the production of qualified Chinese travel brochures.Based on a randomly selected group of 70 samples out of 200,35 BTBs and 35 CTBs, the study is carried out from the following two aspects:Firstly,with Swales and Bhatia's move model, the generic structures of the travel brochures are formulated. The author finds that there are nine structural moves together in both BTBs and CTBs. Through a comparative analysis, the findings are: The two groups have the similar obligatory moves. Therefore, they belong to the same genre-the travel brochures. Actually, the BTBs utilize various and some innovative optional moves and steps to strive for more promotional and persuasive communicative purposes, while the CTBs tend to emphasize on providing information by using some traditional moves and steps.Secondly, based on the above analysis, the author finds that more and more pictures in the two groups take the place of language to realize the functions of certain moves.According to Kress & Van Leeuwen's visual grammatical theory, the author analyzes the interactive meanings of the pictures by means of the contact, the distance, the attitude, and the modality.Most of the pictures in both of the two groups display such features:The pictures interact with the readers through "offering" the information rather than "demanding" their response; the distance between the pictures and the readers is "closely social" type, and generally the readers' attitudes towards the pictures are "dominant" or "equal". The difference in symbolic meanings of the BPs and the CPs is that the former use much more "high" sensory modalities, while the later mainly use "medium" sensory ones.To sum up, the travel brochures as a genre are social-culturally dependent communication events. Practically all the above mentioned similarities and differences of generic structures and symbolic meanings between the BTBs and the CTBs are mainly caused by such background differences as social systems,cultures, ways of thinking and living, and so on. Britain is the first country to develop tourism and it has accumulated a wealth of experience, which is also another cause for differences and its merits should be learned from by the CTBs.The above findings offer somewhat narrow views or features from the author's own perspective because there are much less references of the kind, and anyway, they naturally express some characters in a real-life way.