A Report On C-E Translation Of Appreciating Guilin From A Different Perspective(Chapter 1)

Against the backdrop of the Go Out policy,the “going global” of China’s tourism serves as a vital part in the overseas dissemination of Chinese culture.The tourism industry plays a special role in leading and promoting the development of many other industries,and assumes a historical mission to establish cross-cultural communication and understanding.Hence,the study of tourism translation is of practical and special academic significance.This report is a Chinese-to-English translation report that adopts the Chinese travel book Appreciating Guilin from a Different Perspective as the source text of the translation practice,and,guided by Relevance Theory,analyzes the Chinese-to-English translation practice of the source text.The book is a work about the diversified culture of Guilin.By introducing key historical and cultural sites under national-level protection,the source text,excerpted from the book’s first chapter,is to reflect Guilin’s prehistoric culture,culture relevant to the vassal princes during the Ming dynasty,Buddhist culture,red culture,anti-Japanese war culture,and Guilin’s landscape culture.Relevance Theory is a cognitive science theory,proposed by Sperber and Wilson and applied by Gutt Ernst-August into the study of translation theories and practice.Despite the fact that Relevance Theory is not a translation theory,it has a strong explanatory power to translation.In light of this theory,translation is communication,and an ostensive-inferential activity,and the goal of translation ought to be to achieve optimal relevance.The translator,on the basis of an analysis of the linguistic features in the source text before translation,has found out that the translation barriers are: proper nouns,four-character expressions,culture-loaded words,quotations from poems and sayings,null-subject sentences,run-on sentences,compact sentences,and Chinese-to-English textual differences.This report,guided by Relevance Theory,has adopted translation methods into the practice as a way to create adequate contextual effects and achieve optimal relevance,thus reducing target readers’ processing efforts and enhancing the readability of the translated text.The methods,adopted in the translation,mainly include annotation,paraphrase,conversion,amplification,division,combination,substitution,and adjustment.This report is divided into five chapters: introduction,translation process description,theoretical framework,translation case analysis,and conclusion.Chapter Four,the translation case analysis,is the major part of this report,in which the author,guided by Relevance Theory,uses specific translation methods to investigate the Chinese-to-English translation of tourism texts at lexical,syntactic,and textual levels.It is hoped that this report can provide some reference for the translation of tourism text and the application of Relevance Theory,and also make a humble contribution to the building of Guilin as a world-class tourism city and the“going global” of the Chinese culture.