A Study Of The C-E Translation Strategies For Hotel Introductions In Dalian: From A Functionalist Perspective

In recent years, the booming tourism industry has brought about the boom of hotel industry, the scope of hotel services being extended and customers being multiple. The foreign-related hotel, as the travelers'family, is a window of a country or a district as well as a place and a bond of international exchanges, wherein, hotel brochures are not only important means to expand business and attract customers, but also related to the image of the whole country and national culture of the reception side. Nowadays most of hotels provide English translation of the hotel introductions for foreign customers. Therefore, the quality of foreign-related translation of the hotel brochures will indirectly influence the cultural exchanges between China and other countries in the world.The translation of hotel brochures is categorized into the practical translation, which not only aims at information transmission but also focuses on the effect of information transmission. With prominent functionality and utilitarianism, western functionalist translation theory provides an effective way and breakthrough for practical translation. This theory emphasizes the functionality of the translation and the target text in the target culture. It declares that the translation is a purposeful act, maintaining a certain relationship between the target text and the source text by means of the translation purposes so as to smooth exchanges across cultural barriers. This thesis explores the translation of hotel brochures from the perspective of functionalist translation theory.Through authentic examples, the author points out that the translation of hotel brochures, instead of transferring the Chinese version into corresponding foreign ones in a word-for-word manner, should reveal cultural connotation behind the language. However, a large number of problems appear in currently translated hotel brochures owing to various factors, which have brought about serious negative impact on China's hotel industry and left poor impressions of China and its long-cherished culture on the rest of the world. This thesis is to summarize problems in translating hotel brochures and supply suggestions on how to improve the translation standard.The thesis consists of five parts. Chapter one introduces the research background and significance, objectives, as well as research data and methodology. Chapter two, literature review, first devotes to the overview of functionalism with a detailed description of Newmark's Text Typology and Hans J. Vermeer's Skopostheorie which serves as a theoretical foundation; and also reviews the pre-researches on the C-E publicity translation and the studies on hotel introduction translation. Chapter three delves into the gaps in the English translation of introductions to hotels in Dalian after an analysis of the functions of hotel profiles and the differences between Chinese introductions to hotels in Dalian and English counterparts in the West. In chapter four, the author proposes three C-E translation strategies of the hotel introductions within the functionalism based on the gaps above, and applies the three strategies to analyzing and discussing examples, thus validating the applicability and feasibility of the strategies. Chapter five, conclusion, presents the achievements and limitations of the research.The author holds that the great significance should be attached to the hotel b rochures translation because of the potential social effect of scale. Therefore, this thesis attempts to explore translation methods of hotel brochures from the perspective of functional approach. According to Skopos'theory, the author a nalyzes the functional characteristics of hotel brochures, makes a comparison between Chinese and Western hotel brochures from the perspectives of style a nd culture, and analyzes the linguistic errors, cultural errors and functional er-rors contained in the Chinese-English versions. To achieve the intended purpo se of the target text, the author suggests the translation should not only be c onfined to the forms and contents of the source text, but should employ a va riety of translation methods flexibly. This thesis adopts some specific translati on strategies including addition, deletion, literal translation plus explication an d adaptation.