Skopos Theory Oriented Chinese-English Tourism Translation

In recent years, with China’s daily higher international status, an increasing number of visitors from abroad are eager to come to this mysterious land for a trip. As a consequence, the booming of China’s tourist industry has witnessed demands for high quality tourism translation in large quantities. Since low quality tourist texts may cause misunderstanding or confusion to foreigners, even offend them, it is therefore of great importance to improve the standard of Chinese-English tourism translation.Skopos theory came into being in1970s. It is one of the best developed theories in German Functionalism. Since it is function-oriented and especially pays attention to target reader’s response, Skopos theory, compared with other traditional translation theories, is more feasible to provide guidance for the translation of applied texts, such as tourism translation.In this thesis, the author attempts to integrate Skopos theory with tourism translation and put forward suggestions for practical use in translation. Firstly the author introduces the background and significance of the research, and also lays out the structure of the thesis. Then the author presents a literature review of Skopos theory:the origin of Skopos theory, Skopos theory related translation studies and three basic rules of Skopos theory. After that comes an analysis of Chinese-English tourism translation based on Skopos theory, including how its three basic rules adopted in doing translation. Since translation is an inter-culture and inter-lingual activity, the author then analyses different factors influencing Chinese-English tourism translation and their respective characteristics. In the following chapter, the thesis goes from theoretical exploration to translation practice. The author demonstrates case studies on Chinese-English tourism translation, and sums up five tourism translation methods: literal translation, rewriting, paraphrasing, omission and amplification, in order to handle various translation cases.In the light of Skopos theory and based on analysis of many examples, we can draw the conclusion from the thesis that Skopos theory is appropriate for tourism translation, and translation methods put forth in accordance with Skopos theory are of high applicability. Therefore, Skopos theory is not only reasonable in theory, but also applicable for tourism translation in practice.