Translation Practice Report On The Tour Commentary For Laoyuanzi-Soul Of Zhangjiajie’s Culture

In recent years, along with the vigorous development of Chinese tourism industry, thesocial function of tour commentary has attracted more and more attention. The probing andresearch into the C-E translation of tour commentary has become a hot issue.From the perspective of functionalist approach and on the basis of careful analysis oflinguistic characteristics, text function, and translation brief of tour commentary, this paperdraws the conclusion that the primary intended purpose of the English version is to transmitinformation, attract foreign tourists and disseminate source culture. Three functions, i.e. theinformative, vocative and persuasive, should be achieved to the greatest extent. Hence，thereare two essential principles that translators should abide by: firstly, the version is supposed tobe tourists-orientated; and secondly, its dominant purpose is to disseminate heterogeneousculture and boost trans-cultural communication.Under the guidance of Skopos theory, the writer takes The Tour Commentary forLaoyuanzi—Soul of Zhangjiajie’s Culture as an example and, after a stylistic comparisonbetween Chinese&English tour commentaries, puts forward a couple of feasible C-Etranslation strategies: amplification/omission of words, division/combination/order shift ofsentences and adaptation of paragraphs. It is emphasized in this report that what the translatedtext seeks after is to excavate the deep cultural connotation of the source message instead ofthe mere pursuit of the surface-structure equivalence so as to attract more foreign tourists tovisit Laoyuanzi and better acquaint them with Tujia culture. Meanwhile, the writer also pointsout that translation theories can hardly claim any validity without the support of practice.Only by combining them together can translators fundamentally improve the quality of theversion.