Cross-cultural Awareness In Translating Tourist Materials From Chinese Into English

Translating is a cross-cultural activity and the translator is the medium of the communication between the target readers and the author. It goes without saying that cross-cultural communication requires cross-cultural awareness and this is especially true for the translating of tourist materials. With the booming of tourism, tourist translation has developed rapidly in China, but most English versions of tourist materials are poorly done, for there exist lots of unique items that have never been described before in English. These unique items are mostly culture-loaded in the following six aspects: historical relics, scenery rich in religious sense, the art of gardening, foods, national customs and the thinking mode. To deal with these cultural items properly, translation theorists provide some strategies that are different superficially but similar essentially. The similarity lies in the full and correct transmission of cultural information. The author, by synthesizing the conception of culture and introducing the conception of cross-cultural awareness and its necessity in translating tourist materials, holds that cultural items are translatable through the following strategies: literal translation, transliteration, transliteration plus explanation, transliteration plus literal translation, cultural analogy, and paraphrase. After studying the criteria of translation and those of the translation of tourist publications, the author believes that the transmission of cultural information in tourist materials is what matters most.This thesis consists of five parts: Introduction, three chapters and Conclusion. The introduction is a brief view of the tendency of the translation theory as well as that of modern tourism, which brings to a natural conclusionthat cross-cultural awareness is a must in translating tourist materials. Chapter One briefly deals with the definition of culture and tourist culture. It dwells on the details of the cultural elements in tourist materials which include historical allusions, scenery rich in religious sense, the art of gardening, the culture of foods, national customs and the thinking mode. In Chapter Two, the author explores the definition of cross-cultural awareness in details and the characteristics of tourist materials so as to find out the relationship between them. In the author's eyes, tourist materials are characterized in information, entertainment and culture, which require the translators' cross-cultural awareness when they are faced with the mission of transmitting information and cultural information. This chapter also argues the criteria of translation and tourist material translation. On the basis of the above study, the basic strategies are introduced in Chapter Three, which points out that different types of texts require different translating strategies, this, in some sense, is a sort of dynamical principle for different texts. By "dynamical principle", the author means a faithful reproduction of the source text in one situation and adjustability to the target audience in another. The examples are sorted out for the fe^ibility of each strategy. It is emphasized that cross-cultural awareness should run through the whole process of translating tourist materials. In the conclusion, the author restates the translatability of different cultural factors, which depends on the translator's cross-cultural awareness. The errors in tourist materials mainly result from the lack of cross-cultural awareness. In this thesis, the author presents her studies about cross-cultural awareness and tourist materials, putting forth some suggestions, which are likely to be useful to translators.