A Report On C-E Translation Of A Tourist Guide To Bazhong (Excerpts)

This report is based on the Chinese-English translation project of the first three sections in A Tourist Guide to Bazhong commissioned by Chengdu Xiangyu Translation Co.,Ltd.Against the backdrop of building a Bashu Cultural Tourism Corridor,the translation is intended to publicize Bazhong’s rich tourism resources and spread its unique regional culture,so as to attract more English-speaking tourists to Bazhong and to facilitate its development of tourist industry.As a tourism text,at the lexical level,the source text boasts abundant scenic spot names containing cultural background information and culture-loaded words reflecting Bazhong’s folk customs.At the syntactic level,lots of parallel sentence structures are employed to list scenic spots,and loosely-organized sentence structures to portray the intoxicating tourist attractions.At the rhetorical level,similes and quotations are utilized to describe the exotic scenery vividly.Based on the textual features and the translation purposes of the source text,Peter Newmark’s translation theory is selected as the theoretical basis in the report.The theory is mainly composed of text typology theory and two translation strategies.According to different language functions,Newmark primarily classifies texts into expressive texts,informative texts and vocative texts.Different text types require different translation strategies.Specifically speaking,semantic translation is used for expressive texts,communicative translation for informative and vocative texts.In this translation project,the difficulty lies in how to achieve the communicative effect of the source text while conveying its semantic information.Through analysis,the report finds Newmark’s translation theory does have certain feasibility to the translating of Chinese tourism texts.Under the guidance of semantic translation,literal translation of similes and rhyming of quoted folk songs and Chinese poems help reproduce the vivid description and prosodic beauty of the source text.Under the guidance of communicative translation,simplification of parallel sentence structures and restructuring of loosely-organized sentence structures not only contribute to delivering the information of the source text,but also conform to the writing characteristics of English tourism texts.Under the combined guidance of the two translation strategies,transliteration plus generic terms with free translation of scenic spot names are conducive to revealing their cultural background information while conveying the semantic and directive meanings;literal translation plus annotation are helpful to compensate for the cultural defaults,boosting the communication and transmission of the culture.This report summarizes the translation techniques applicable to the translating of Chinese tourism texts in the light of Newmark’s translation theory through analyzing the textual features of the source text,so as to provide some reference to the translating of Chinese tourism texts.