On The C-E Translation Of Five-Star Hotel Brochures:from The Perspective Of Functionalist Approach

As an important means for the hotel to conduct the external propaganda, the hotel brochure is the miniature of hotel’s image, performance and cultural connotation, and also the window for the hotel to contact with foreign countries and people. Hotel brochure is offered by the hotel or issued on the Internet to introduce its long history, convenient location, perfect facilities, services, delicious food and places of interest near the hotel. In order to meet needs of foreign tourists, nearly all five-star hotels in China have English&Chinese bilingual brochures. High quality Chinese-English bilingual brochures will give foreign customers the perfect first impression, and in turn, foreign customers will be attracted to stay and consume at the hotel. However, inaccurate or inferior C-E translation of the five-star hotel brochure will influence the hotel’s image and then affect its business and profit.The author has collected nearly one hundred pieces of five-star hotels’Chinese-English bilingual brochures from various big cities, such as Beijing, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Changsha, Chengdu, Chongqing, Zhengzhou and so on by means of traveling, express mails and E-mails. There are also e-brochures collected from surfing the Internet. After studying and analyzing those brochures, the author finds that generally the brochure of English version is of poor quality, and there are many errors and problems, such as multi-versions of one place of interest, misspelling of the capital letters, wrong spelling of English words, grammatical errors and so on. Therefore, it’s urgent to study the hotel brochure text and take some actions to improve the current translation quality.Based on the German functionalist translation theory, this thesis classifies, analyzes and studies translation errors existing in the C-E translation of the collected five-star hotel brochures, enlightenments of three rules of the Skopos theory to the C-E translation of five-star hotel brochures are analyzed, some translation strategies are respectively proposed to promote the C-E translation quality of five-star hotel brochures in China, and in turn, to facilitate the development and prosperity of Chinese hotel industry.