Culture And Message Transfer In C/E Tourism Translation

With the development of tourism industry in China, more and more touris' materials are translated into English. China is famous for abundant natural and cultural scenery. When introducing it to the foreign visitors, translators should make efforts to deal with cultural factors and to transfer the messages properly in tourisi material C/E translation in order to attract more foreign visitors to China.The first chapter introduces the present problems in tourism material translation. And the second chapter covers the relation between tourist and culture. Much attention is paid to the motivations of the foreigners visiting China and the tourist message receptors' psychological, aesthetic and religious and customary differences in message transmitting.The third chapter centers on a comparative study of tourist materials in Chinese and English. A comparison is made to bring the features of the respective language for tourism to light. English for tourism is substantial in information, narrative, plain, factual and specific; while Chinese for tourism is unsubstantial in information, descriptive, elegant and general.The characteristics of tourist culture make us bring Nida's theory of dynamic equivalence to our attention. Aware of the cultural difference between nations, and trying to reduce it to the minimum, Nida points out: "The provision of cultural conditioning always implies the entire problem of the extent to which certain adjustments can and should be made in the transfer" (Nida, 1976:132). The forth chapter introduces Nida's theory of dynamic equivalence in detail as well as the contributions of the theory. And it analyses theoretically the application of Nida's theory to C/E tourism translation based on the functions of tourist material and the feature of tourist translation to verify the feasibility and necessity.The last chapter, by applying Nida's theory, makes analysis of many examples to further illustrate the application of his theory to tourist translation from a practical point of view, and proposes some methods in C/E tourism translation. It centers on two situations: when information of the source text is overloaded andwhen information of the source text is inadequate. In order to achieve equivalence of information, the author tentatively proposes the methods of deletion, paraphrase and adaptation to reduce the redundant information and methods of addition and explanation to supplement necessary additional information. At the same time, the author proposes the method of analogy to translate some culture-loaded parts in order to achieve the equivalence of cultural message.However, absolute equivalence is just an ideal which can only be approached rather than achieved. It is only an ideal set for the translator to work towards. So what we aim at is to center on the readers and to provide the readers with sufficient and proper information after comprehensively analyzing the cultural differences in tourism C/E translation. Thus, the foreign visitors can admire the magnificent scenery in China as well as comprehend the long and plentiful culture of China.