A Report On Translation Of Tourist Guidance On Custom

With the rapid development of inbound tourism, a growing number of foreign tourists have been attracted to China for its unique folk culture in recent years. However, this poses a great challenge for the translation of Chinese tourist guidance, especially those on customs, which will affect the international communication of Chinese ethnic culture directly.Based on my own translation practice of tourist guidance, this report reviews and summarizes the whole process of translation practice, and addresses the translation strategies and methods of tourist guidance. The original text mainly describes folklores and customs of ethnic minorities, so lots of culture-loaded expressions are included. And due to striking differences between Chinese and Western culture, it is difficult to translate those culture-loaded words into English correspondingly. Since the translation of tourist guidance is aimed to communicate Chinese culture to foreign tourists and stimulate them at the same time, the translated text should be natural and authentic in language and express cultural connotation of culture-loaded expressions to the full. In light of the Skopos Theory, this report points out that the strategy of foreignization combined with domestication is applied in translation, while the methods of transliteration with explication and substitution are used for lexical gap and semantic vacancy to ensure that the translation expresses cultural information effectively. Besides, omission is used to delete some obscure or meaningless words so that the translation can be easily understood by foreign tourists.This report not only offers a reference for Chinese guides to introduce folk culture to foreign tourists, but also benefits the research and practice of the Chinese-English translation of tourist guidance on folklore.