Study On The Mistranslation Of C-E Translation Of Tourism Texts At Scenic Spots In Xi'an

The Chinese tourism is booming for its rich natural and cultural sceneries. These precious resources attract millions of foreign tourists to come to China for sightseeing every year. World Tourism Organization estimated that China would become the world's largest tourist destination by the year 2020. It goes without saying that the English versions of tourism texts as important publicity materials will play a vital role in all kinds of tourism activities and it can be an important channel of transmitting the tourist information and Chinese culture.As one of the most famous historical cities in China, Xi'an possesses a large number of tourism attractions attracting more and more foreign tourists. Unfortunately, a number of flaws have appeared in the C-E translation of tourism texts in Xi'an, which is far from being satisfactory, and further negatively affects the communicative purpose with foreign tourists and lessens the charm of Xi'an in the international community.German Functionalist Theory (Katharina Reiss,1971) proposed that the target text's function and purpose should be realized among the target readers. Anything that obstructs the achievement of this purpose is a translation problem, and an inadequate solution to a translation problem is a translation error. Christine Nord divided translation problems into four categories which are linguistic, pragmatic, cultural and text-specific problems. Combining with the survey of tourism attractions around Xi'an, the author surveys the three major kinds of problems in Xi'an tourism texts which are linguistic, pragmatic and cultural problems.Based on the functionalist theory, the thesis mainly adopts qualitative methodology. The author classifies and analyzes the translation problems existing in Xi'an tourism texts and reckons the main reasons for these translation errors lie in the great divergence in linguistic and cultural aspects between Chinese and English-speaking countries. Therefore, the author contrasts the linguistic and cultural differences in detail so as to improve the quality of C-E translation of tourism texts.Last but not least, the thesis discusses some effective translation methods in order to achieve the anticipant functions of tourism texts.