A Study Of C-E Translation Of Tourism Arts And Handicrafts Descriptions From The Perspective Of Skopostheorie

With the increasing cross-cultural communication brought by globalization, language service has become an important index of China's soft national power. The C-E translation of tourism information, including tourism art and handicrafts descriptions is closely related to cross-culture communication and economic exchange. As an important window for cultural exchanges, its standardization decides the quality of China's language service to some degree. At present, the study of tourism culture and market translation has accumulated a series of achievements. However, most of these studies focus on the translation of tour guide manuals, tourism slogans and publicities. Rare are the studies specifically on the translation of tourism arts and handicrafts descriptions. This thesis takes the initiative to study the prevalent problems and difficulties in the C-E translation of the text and seeks for a feasible theoretical framework to deal with them from the perspective of Skopostheorie.The originality of the present study lies in that it applies a macro plus micro, hierarchical analysis model. In the macro aspect, the author introduced the three rules of Skopostheorie to specify the translation brief of the text, aided by Nord's model for translation-oriented text analysis which was newly proposed in 2005. The result is clearly showed in the form of the table. In the micro aspect, Information Highlighting Strategic Principle is applied to classify and evaluate different information in such kind of text. The author believes although tourism arts and handicrafts descriptions have similarities in text feature, they are different in the themes to be highlighted. Even the texts describing the same products may focus on different themes according to their functions and Skopos in the communicative situation. Therefore, translator should use corresponding strategies and skills to deal with the information of varied types and with unequal value, so as to highlight the thematic information.With the help of the scientific analysis model, the study found that the common problems in the English translation of Chinese tourism arts and handicrafts descriptions are: machine translation, misspelling or grammatical mistakes, chinglish and cultural misinterpretation. These problems are mainly due to the lack of quality awareness, translator's linguistic competence as well as the inadequacy of cross-cultural awareness. Undoubtedly a variety of difficulties in the transferring of the text also attribute to the existing problems. In general, the prevalent difficulties include: the dealing of technical words, Proper words, set phrases such as four-character phrases in lexical level; the dealing of rhetorical sentences such as antithesis and parallelism in syntactic level and the dealing of information containing cultural factors in cultural level. The result indicates that the combination of Skopostheorie and Information Highlighting Strategic Principle provides a feasible theoretical framework to solve the above mentioned problems and improve the C-E translation of tourism arts and handicrafts descriptions. Besides, sixteen manipulative rules under the Information Highlighting Strategic Principle are generalized as the more specific skills for translation. The result also proves that Information Highlighting Strategic Principle is effective in supplementing Skopostheorie at a micro level and their combination makes a perfect match for the English translation of Chinese tourism arts and handicrafts descriptions.