A Study On C-E Translation Of Tourist Texts In Hubei Province From A Parallel Text Approach

Hubei province, located in the middle reaches of the Yangtze River and central China, is naturally endowed with undulating green mountains, stretches of waters, dense forests, and diversified landforms. It also takes pride in its long history and rich cultural heritage as the Holy Land of the earliest ancestor of China—Yan Di and the birthplace of Chu culture. With countless breathtaking sceneries and attractions to offer, Hubei should never fail to entice and enchant travelers home and abroad. However, the overall level of tourist translation in Hubei province, or more specifically, the English versions of tourist texts introducing Hubei’s attractions, does not do full justice to one of China’s most beautiful lands. The underlying causes of the unsatisfactory quality of these translations can be multi-faceted, but the task to improve C-E translation in Hubei province is a matter of great urgency.Over the past few decades, a large number of scholars both at home and abroad have been devoted to the study on tourist translation. Owing to their efforts, tourist texts have come to secure the position of a specialized discourse which calls for special attention. The introduction of linguistic, literary, cultural theories and theories from other fields into the research on the practice of tourist translation has opened new horizon to the subject. Modern technology, such as the Internet and corpus has greatly pushed empirical studies. In spite of the enormous achievements in tourist translation study, translators, especially novice translators, would more often than not find themselves at a loss in face of the complicated linguistic and non-linguistic problems in practice. Therefore, the thesis attempts to conduct a study on C-E translation of tourist texts in Huber province based on a parallel text approach and to suggest solutions to problems arising from practice.Parallel text is defined in this paper as authentic, non-translated texts chosen from the target-culture text repertoire. The intertextual nature of translation and the functionalist translation theory inspires and allows the author to draw upon original English tourist texts that have already existed in the English language and served tourism industry so as to guide the translation process and produce target texts able to fulfill the function of attracting foreign travelers. Linguistic and cultural differences are worked out through a contrastive analysis of Chinese tourist texts and their parallel texts, which better foregrounds the features and conventions of English tourist texts. By referring to parallel texts at word, sentence and discourse level as well as cultural factors, tentative versions of tourist texts in Hubei province were offered.The study proves the feasibility of making use of parallel texts in tourist translation. It also carries implication for novice translators to overcome linguistic and cultural hurdles in other types of translation, especially practical translation. It is hoped that more efforts will be devoted to tourism promotion drive in Hubei province and more practical, efficient and reliable strategies can be provided for tourist translation.