Intertextual Analysis Of Tour Guide Texts Translation In Two Versions

With growing numbers of foreigners coming to China for a visit, tourism, as one of the pillar industries, has been playing a rather important role in economic development. According to WTO (World tourism organization), China will become one of the largest tourism destination for tourists and the fourth tourists export country throughout the world by2020.Currently, tourism is becoming one of the strategic pillar industries in China of its national economy. To ensure the leading position of tourism in the development of local economy, lots of regions had made relevant plans. With a long history, abundant tourism resources and rich cultural heritage, Shanxi is greatly favored by tourists at home and abroad. As the national key cultural object protection unit, Shanxi is renowned as the theme park of Chinese civilization and art museum of ancient architecture in China. With booming tourism in Shanxi, numerous foreign visitors came for its great reputation, thus brought unprecedented opportunities and challenges to its tourism industry. This has raised an urgent problem:How to attract foreign visitors by introducing characteristic tourism resources effectively and promote communication among cultures?According to the intertextual theory, each text is the absorption and revision of others. They learnt from and connected with each other. Although tour guide texts emphasis much on uniqueness, no tour guide composers can write texts totally isolated from existed ones. Based on this theory, this thesis adopts the intertextual typology model proposed by Hatim and Mason.This thesis chooses two English versions written by the Chinese and the foreigners respectively and finds their similarities and differences in contents and structure. In the aspect of contents, Chinese compilers tend to use intertextual devices such as allusion, proverbs and idioms. While foreign compilers prefer to use common intertextual devices like cliche, quotation, conventionalism with precise words in a natural way. In the aspect of structure, Chinese prefer to use CE (Celebrity Endorsement) move. Foreigners like to use moves such as M (Maps) and CI (Consulting Information). Those differences in two versions are due to different cultural background and thinking patterns between east and west.According to these differences in two versions, this thesis makes suggestions to both compilers and translators:For compilers, they can add or reduce intertextuality devices appropriately and adjust relevant moves of texts; translators can take translation strategies like restructure, materialize logic and addition, omission, paraphrase and rewrite so as to achieve the goal of attracting more potential foreign visitors know culture in Shanxi.