A Comparative Genre Analysis Of Chinese And Western English Tourist Information Texts On The Internet From The Cross-Cultural Perspective

Genre analysis, which is considered as a new development of discourse analysis,has drawn much attention from linguists and scholars around the world.Tourist information texts (TITs) on the Internet are an increasingly frequent andimportant communicative publicity literature, which have been playing a significantrole in tourism publicity campaign. According to the author’s observation, however,many online English TITs in China are simply literal translations of their Chineseversions, which may not help promote the attractions effectively. Thus, it is of greatsignificance to conduct a comparative research between Chinese and western TITs,which may give implications on writing and translation of TITs online in China.Based on genre analysis theory, this thesis compares and contrasts the movestructures between Chinese and western TITs with30Chinese and30western EnglishTITs, which are all collected from professional or official tourism websites on theInternet. Enlightened by Swales and Bhatia’s move models and Hasan’s methodologyof Generic Structural Potential (GSP), the thesis aims to identify the move structuresadopted by the native specialists of English TITs on the Internet and analyze theircommunicative purposes, and then makes a comparison of Chinese and westernEnglish TITs online and explores the reasons for the similarities and differences fromsocial and cultural perspectives, and finally puts forward suggestions for writing andtranslating TITs in China.Guided by the framework, the comparative genre analysis is conducted by bothqualitative method and quantitative method. Major findings of the study firstly indicatethat TITs on the Internet, as a promotional genre, mainly serve the communicativepurposes of attracting, informing and persuading. And both the Chinese and westernTITs share the obligatory moves of “attention and interest arousing”,“elaboration ofthe attraction or the tour”, and “response soliciting”. However, Chinese TITs haveone more obligatory move of “promotion from different indirect aspects” and the movestructure of Chinese TITs is relatively stable.The similarities between the Chinese and western TITs on the Internet are mainlyattributed to cultural universalism, economic globalization and the nature ofcommunicative purposes. The differences can be mostly explained by social andcultural differences, such as the distinctive cultural roots, different economic systems,and the differences between high-context and low-context cultures, individualism andcollectivism. Finally, this thesis offers suggestions on how to write and translate TITs in China.Tourist promoters are advised to bear cross-cultural and genre awareness and makeproper modifications of the move structure of the source text in order to best realize itscommunicative purposes in the target culture.