A Preliminary Research On Chinese-English Translation Of Tourist Materials

Covering an area of 9.6 million square kilometers, China is a country with an ancient civilization dating back to several thousand years ago. Her rich and colorful culture, taking shape in the course of dozens of dynasties, cast an irresistible charm on the people of the world. More and more foreign tourists come to China to get a better understanding of this mysterious eastern country. At present, tourism in China is developing at a high speed, although it is still very young and inexperienced compared with developed western countries in this field. How to introduce China and its unique culture to the outside world so as to let it merge into the world becomes the focus of our exterior propaganda.Catering to the needs of foreign tourists, a large number of tourist materials written in English or translated from Chinese to English are published to introduce scenic spots and promote Chinese culture, including tourist brochures, guidebooks, travel magazines etc. However, among these materials, the good and the bad are intermingled. Those bad translation works have been exerting a negative influence over the development of tourism, so this situation needs to be improved immediately. The compilation of the thesis is to summarize problems in translating tourist materials and supply suggestions on how to improve the translation standard.The thesis consists of four chapters:Chapter one mainly introduces the current development of tourism in China and points out some problems in translating tourist materials. An example is cited to show the serious situation in this field.Chapter two discusses the relationship among tourism, culture and translation with a conclusion that culture is the right "soul" of tourism, so the principle of translating this kind of materials is to preserve the original flavor in the source texts as much as possible. According to themain functions of tourist materials, that is to inform and attract foreign tourists, the translation strategy must be the combination of the two approaches-foreignization and domestication, but more preference is given to the former for the sake of promoting Chinese culture in a more effective way.Chapter three discusses several aspects of translating tourist materials, including translating names of scenic spots, translating materials concerning proper names, historical events and culture-specific objects, methods of dealing with flowery descriptions of scenic spots and translation concerning Buddhist sacred spots. As a kind of mainly informative and operative text, tourist materials must be translated by the combination of various methods, such as addition, analogy, reduction, and paraphrase etc. During the process of translating, we should preserve specific cultural elements in the source text as possible as we can; in the mean time, we have to make our translation comprehensible to the target receptors.Chapter four is the conclusion of the thesis. In conclusion, this thesis states that it is very important for us to improve the quality of translating tourist materials at present. This work must be done through careful analysis of the characteristics of tourist materials and under the guidance of suitable translation strategies.