A Research On The C-E Translation Errors In "Red Tourism" Texts From The Perspective Of Functional Translation Theory

With the further improvement of China’s overall national strength,China’s tourism industry has entered a globalized era.According to WTO’s forecast,China will become the largest inbound destination and the fourth largest outbound tourist country by 2020."Red tourism",as a unique part of Chinese culture,refers to the memorial sites where the Communist Party of China led the people through the revolutionary war.The Revolutionary Memorial Hall,as an epitome of Chinese history,has increasingly attracted foreign tourists to visit.However,there are still many translation errors in the "red tourism" texts of our country,which obstructs the effective communication of Chinese history and culture.Therefore,it is of great practical significance to analyze such translations so as to improve translation quality of the "red tourism"texts.According to functional translation theory,translation is considered as a purposeful activity.If the purpose of a translation is to achieve a particular for the target addressee,anything that obstructs the achievement of this purpose is a translation error.Nord classifies translation errors into four categories:linguistic,cultural,pragmatic,and textual errors.This thesis takes the C-E translation of seven revolutionary memorial halls in Gansu as the research object and attempts to analyze the translation errors of the C-E texts in the revolutionary memorial halls under the guidance of Nord’s functional translation theory.Besides,the thesis adopts a descriptive and case study on the C-E translation errors in the revolutionary memorial halls with the attempt to explore the major types of translation errors and the reasons for such errors and possible ways to improve the C-E translation quality in the revolutionary memorial halls.The research findings show that there are three major translation errors---pragmatic,cultural and linguistic errors in the revolutionary memorial halls of Gansu.The research also finds that the pragmatic translation errors occur because of translator’s ignorance of the target functions,ignoring target receivers’ acceptance and disloyalty to the source texts;the cultural translation errors are mainly caused by the misuse of Pinyin,ignoring aesthetic differences and absence of background information as well as the causes of linguistic errors are due to the misspellings,inappropriate diction,collocational errors,ungrammatical lexical and syntactical structures.In addition,the author attempts to explore the main reasons for such errors and finds that the errors are caused by incompetent translators,unawareness of the cultural differences and inadequate supervision over the translation.At the end of this thesis,the author suggests theways to the improvement of the translation quality in the revolutionary memorial halls,including the improvement of translators’ competence to better achieve the intended functions of such texts,a specialized corpus established for the "red tourism" translation to improve the translation and strengthening the management over the translation to promote the development of the "red tourism".