An Analysis Of English Publicity Materials Of National Lake Areas From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

China is rich in tourism resources due to its vast territory and long history. The Chinese government listed 225 sites as National Scenic Areas in 8 documents from 1982 to 2012. The number of overseas visitors has been increasing since the Reform and Opening-up, which gives forth the necessity of English publicity materials in these areas.There are 26 lakes among the 225 National Scenic Areas, which are the research targets of this thesis. Lakes are not the first choices for foreigners when they consider China as a destination; however, China also offers distinguished lakes such as Qinghai Lake, China’s biggest inland saline lake, and Erhai Lake, a “jade mirror” at the foot of the Cangshan Mountain. This research aims to bring about better English publicity texts for these lakes to make them more attractive places to visit based on detailed analysis of existing texts and further investigations into potential overseas visitors’ taste under the light of Reception Aesthetics.The existing translation studies of tourist sites have focused on Functional Translation. This researched functional equivalence in translation, but failed to discover the essential factor of actual effect. A fair number of other scholars paid attention to the effect, using Skopos Theory to study the English translation of the scenic areas, yet lacking persuasiveness when it comes to the potential readers. This thesis further explores the acceptability of English translated materials to the readers from the perspective of Reception Aesthetics.This dissertation collects a relatively complete Chinese introduction and English Translations of the lake scenic spots from their official websites and some tourism monographs. In this thesis, the author reviews the general situation of domestic lake scenic areas’ English Translation, choosing 8 lake scenic spots out of the all 26 for detailed analysis, summing up to 5973 English words. During the process of close reading to the translated versions, the author found that there were many difficulties in understanding the texts, some used long discourses to describe an uninterested aspect such as the location or the formation, some told a historic story of no highlights with the whole passage. The content was not easy to understand even to a Chinese reader, so the author extracted typical statements from the materials and designed a questionnaire for the potential foreign tourists, based on which China’s translated texts of famous lake areas can be analyzed by quality and effectiveness.On the selection of surveyed questions, this dissertation summarized three dimensions after intensive reading into Jieshou Meixue Daolun(Introduction to Reception Aesthetics) by Liyuan Zhu and Theory of Reception-Response by Yuanpu Jin. From the perspective of “Readers Orientation”, readers’ Aesthetic Delight and readers’ Expectation Visions, the questionnaire designed 20 questions for overseas tourists, by analyzing the understandability, attractiveness and persuasiveness of certain translated texts, which feature in one or more dimensions of Reception Aesthetics. This thesis aims to offer some useful suggestions for tourism material translation.