A Study Of The English Version Of Qilu Tourism Culture From The Perspective Of Cultranslation And Contrastive Text Analysis

The present thesis is intended to clarify the theory of cultranslation and to apply it to the translation practice of Qilu tourism culture. In doing so, the thesis attempts to explore the effective methods applied to the translation of tourism culture under the guide of the theory of cultranslation and find solutions to the problems found in the present English versions of Qilu tourism culture. For these purposes, the thesis, divided into four parts, deals with the following issues.Chapter One is a retrospection of the development of cultranslation. The development of cultranslation abroad is attributed to such translation theorists as Nida, Newmark, Bassnet, Hornby and the leading scholars of German Functionalist School, while cultranslation in China is the concern of many Chinese scholars, especially Liu Miqing, who has formulated the theoretical frame of cultranslation in 1999. Nida and Newmark have classified the cultural factors involved in translation into several categories and proposed the relevant translation strategies as well. The scholars who advocate Translation Studies set free the translation from comparative literature and linguistics and argue that translation study is experiencing a cultural turn, i.e. translation study turns to focus on a broad perspective-the cultural context. The scholars from German functional School contribute to the development of translation research by approaching translation from functional perspective in line with the text type. Chinese scholars in translation field have made attempts at exploring cultural factors, cultural discrepancies and translation strategies with the purpose of finding solutions to the problems caused by cultural discrepancies.Chapter Two expounds the theory of cultrnaslation, which approaches translation from cultural perspectives and consists of five integral parts. Firstly,cultranslation is based on an assumption about the indispensable relationship between language, culture and translation. Secondly, a new insight into the definition of translation i.e. translation is defined as interlingual and intercultural communication, is regarded as the kernel of cultranslation. The definition of translation from the cultranslation perspective casts off the misconception that translation is a code-switching process and thus shed light on the translation practice. Thirdly, the function of the text, regulated by the intentions of the author, the initiator or the translator and the readers' expectations, should be considered by the translators who want to make an adequate translation and to solve the problem of untransbility. Fourthly, cultranslation requires the translator to be bilingual and bicultural, for he/she acts as the receiver of the source text and the producer of the target text at the same time. Finally, according to the study of my supervisor Professor Yang Min, translation involves the temporal and spatial shift from the source culture to the target culture. The temporal and spatial shift involved in translation calls for the due attention of the translator, who is obliged to make the target text function as effectively in the target culture as the source text in the source culture.Chapter Three is focused on the contrastive discourse analysis between the English versions of Qilu tourism culture and the English tourism publications so as to detect the different features of the two kinds of tourism English and to provide some norms for the translation of Qilu tourism culture. After a brief clarification of the definition of Qilu tourism culture and the validity and classifications of the samples concerned in the present thesis, the thesis makes a contrastive discourse analysis of three parameters the tourism English: the tenor of discourse, the texture of discourse and the way of introducing historical culture in tourism publications. By comparison, I find that the two kinds of tourism English are different in impersonality, formality, inaccessibility, diction and the way to introduce historical culture involved in tourism. Th...