A Study On Intercultural Text Restructuring In The Translation Of City Promotion Materials

The present research probes into the translation of city promotion materials onthe macro and micro level, based on the theory of intercultural communication andfunctional theories of translation. The author tries to establish a framework oftranslation of city promotion materials and puts forward the concept of Three Stagesof Intercultural Promotion and The Proportion of Culture Loaded Information, as wellas the concept of intercultural text restructuring. At last the author explores theconstructive restructuring in different layer of language.Based on the small-scale corpus the author has built, the dissertation firstanalyzes of the translation problems in the overviews of the30Chinese cities, withthe materials of their sister cities in the US as the comparable texts. By comparing thesemantic and syntactic features of the materials in the two languages, the author findsa trend of complexity in China’s city overviews. For instance, Chinese translators tendto use longer and more complex sentences with more clauses, and more markedthemes and enhanced themes than the comparable texts. As a result, the sentences areoverloaded, especially the beginning of some sentences. On the discourse level, cityoverviews in Chinese generally use scattered items in the thematic progression insteadof “topic items” in English parallel texts. In consequence, the translated texts followthe original thematic progression and make the texts incoherent in the target language.The author then explores translation process of city promotion materials. Inpre-translation phase, translators should analyze the external factors and edit theoriginal texts in light of the expected functions and purpose. In translation phase,translators should analyze the functional varieties and focus on the process oftrans-editing. After translation, translators should pay attention to the effects andfeedback of intercultural communication, and then re-adjust previous strategies.Due to the cognitive, aesthetic and narrative differences of the Chinese andEnglish languages, translators of city promotion materials should restructure the texts on the semantic, syntactic, paragraph and discourse level. Restructuring strategiesinclude compensation, contraction, division and combination, imitation, readjustmentand rewriting.