Cultural Factors In The Translation Of The Tourist Materials

With the development of the tourist industry of China, more and more materials concerning tourist industry need to be translated into English, but the quality of such kind of translation is not satisfactory. What are the reasons for the poor quality of the translation of the tourist materials? Till now, we lack specific and systematic studies on this kind of translation in spite of the fact that the quality of the tourist translation is closely linked with the image of our country in the world.The present paper aims at finding out the main reasons of the poor quality of such kind of translation. The author thinks that the main reason lies in the cultural factors instead of the linguistic factors. The paper begins with some general discussion about culture, then the cultural differences between the west and east in tourist industry. Then the paper introduces the functionalists approaches to translation and Nida's theory of functional equivalence and the reader's response. According to the author's opinion, because of the special nature of the translation of the tourist materials and the function of tourist text, this kind of translation should be purpose- oriented. And it is unnecessary for us to aim at the static, word-to-word equivalence. Instead, the translator has more freedom in this kind of translation, functional equivalence is most desirable. And the sixth part of the paper is the suggestions of the author, in this part, the author gives the criteria of its translation and a lot of examples about how to treat the cultural factors in this kind of translation. The last part is the conclusion.