Research On The C-E Translation Of Tourism Public Signs From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

With the development of China’s economy, China is playing an increasinglyimportant role on the world stage, and thus attracting more and more foreign touristscome to crowd in sightseeing. English versions of tourism public signs, as an importantbridge for international exchange and communication, are playing an important role insetting up China’s international image. However, the current state of the C-E tourismpublic signs translation is far from satisfactory with many problems to be solved. Theseproblems not only puzzle the foreign tourists, but also damage our country’s internationalimage. In order to promote cross-cultural communication and to establish a good imageof our country, it is necessary to conduct in-depth and systematic study of this topic.Researches on public signs have attracted many scholars’ attention, but there arefew researches on tourism public signs translation. What’s more, researches on tourismpublic signs translation are mostly done from the perspective of Functional TranslationTheory, Adaptation Theory, Skopos Theory, etc. This thesis intends to give a systemicstudy from a new perspective of Relevance Theory and to provide an effective guide forthe C-E translation of tourism public signs. Relevance Theory is a new cognitivecommunication theory which holds that communication not only involves coding,transferring and decoding process, but also involves human beings’ cognitive inference.Under the framework of Relevance Theory, translation is a double ostensive-inferentialprocess, the translator has the responsibility to make a rational inference and choice oncodes, according to the intention of the source text author and the cognitive constructionand environment of the target text readers, so as to make the target readers find out theoptimal relevance between the translation and context. This thesis adopts RelevanceTheory as the guiding theory to analyze the principle and process of tourism public signstranslation, and explore the role of the translator in tourism public signs translation. At thesame time, the author makes an analysis on errors the current existing in tourism publicsigns translation colleted by the author. At last some practical strategies are proposed onthe base of the analysis of the errors. All the data in this thesis are from the author’s dailyaccumulation, books, website, and these public signs are universal and representative.The whole thesis includes the following parts:Chapter1is the introduction including the background of the study, the significanceof the study, the purpose of the study, data and method and organization of the thesis. Chapter2is the literature review, mainly including studies on the C-E tourism publicsigns translation and studies on Relevance Theory abroad and at home.Chapter3is the theoretical framework which systematically introduces thedefinitions, features, functions of tourism public signs and the main concepts ofRelevance Theory, that is, ostensive-inferential process, context and cognitiveenvironment, principle of relevance and the optimal relevance, etc.Chapter4is the main body of the thesis, which is about application of RelevanceTheory to the C-E translation of tourism public signs. First, the author makes an analysison the principle and process of the C-E translation of tourism public signs and exploresthe role of the translator in tourism public signs translation. Then it analyzes the errors inthe present C-E translation of tourism public signs from the perspective of RelevanceTheory, and puts forward some practical strategies on the base of the errors.Chapter5is the conclusion, in which the author concludes the contents of this thesis,major findings, implications from the study and some limitations of this study andguidance for the future study.Through the study, the author mainly gets the following achievements:(1) It proves that it’s feasible to apply Relevance Theory to tourism public signstranslation, which is different from Functional Translation Theory, Adaptation Theoryand Skopos Theory, etc. Relevance Theory pays more attention to the predominant roleof the translator in the process of translation. The translator should take the target readers’cognition and culture into consideration to achieve optimal relevance between the sourcetext and the target text.(2) According to Relevance Theory, the process of public signs translation is anostensive-inferential process; optimal relevance can be the principle of translation as wellas the ultimate goal of translators in the process of translation. The translator should makethe target readers achieve maximum contextual effects with minimum processing effortto achieve optimal relevance.(3) Through the analysis of the errors in tourism public signs translation from theperspective of Relevance Theory, we can make the conclusion that to achieve optimalrelevance with minimum processing effort, the translator should be competent atbi-language and bi-culture, thus the translator can infer correctly from the source text andconvey the communicative intention to the target readers. To make sure that the targetreaders can achieve optimal relevance, the translator can adopt some translationstrategies from two aspects. One is to ensure adequate contextual effects, which meanswe can take literal translation, imitation and addition; the other is to reduce the target readers’ processing effort, which means we can adopt literal translation, borrowing, andomission.The author hopes the thesis can make the study on tourism public signs translationmore comprehensive and systematic, and promote the language environment to set up agood image of China. But the author only analyzes parts of tourism public signs whichshow some limitations and one-sidedness. The author expects that more people will dothe full-scale and in-depth research in this area and then give guidance for the C-Etranslation of tourism public signs, so we can have a good language environment andimprove our country’s international image.