A Report On Chinese-English Translation Of Tourism Texts Under The Guidance Of Newmark’s Translation Theory

This report is based on a translation task of translating Chinese textual matter for tourism into English for "Spring Sight",a WeChat mini program launched by the government of Lixia District,Jinan City,for promoting and upgrading the internationalization service in its urban tourist areas.The content mainly includes a bilingual introduction of mountain and spring scenic spots,residential blocks of historical interests,and intangible cultural heritage in Lixia District,for audio-visual and textual presentation through a WeChat mini program.The difficulties met with in this practice of translation are analyzed at lexical and sentence levels.From the perspective of lexical level,the key problems that the translator encountered in translation mainly involve proper nouns,culture-loaded words and Chinese four-character structures.At the sentence level,the difficulty arises from the fact that Chinese sentence structure relies on parataxis,making the cohesive and logical clues of the sentences less prominent than English readers would expect.At the same time,the style of expression in the original text pursues a neat and antithetical sentence pattern,or profusely quotes famous poems,to enhance the literary elevation of language.These require the translator to find suitable wording and expression to make the target text stylistically acceptable to the receptor audience.In addition,the source text contains a lot of cultural background information,which must be properly processed to make it intelligible for the English audience.Under the guidance of Newmark’s communicative translation and semantic translation theory,the translator adopts different translation methods to deal with the key points and difficulties encountered in the translation process,starting from the target reader-oriented principle,the effect-focused communicative principle and the principle of respect for norms of the target language.Under the target reader-oriented principle,the translator adopts transliteration plus annotation and amplification to ensure that readers fully understand the cultural information implied in the source text.Under the effect-focused communicative principle,the translator selects the methods of omission,paraphrasing and negation to ensure the readability of the target text and convey the communicative effect of the source text.Under the principle of respect for norms of the target language,the translator uses combination,division and hypotaxis methods to deal with the logical relationship between sentences and part of the four-character structures,so as to allow the translation conform to the expression habits of the target language readers.