Chinese-English Translation Errors And Problems In Tourist Information--A Functional Approach

China's tourism has fully advanced along with the development of reform and opening up. Foreign tourists know about China's tourist resources and culture through tourist information, whose Chinese-English (C-E) translation plays an important role in cross-cultural communication.As an international metropolitan, Beijing has a large number of scenic spots and attracts numerous foreign tourists. However, a lot of translation problems and errors lower the quality of C-E translation of tourist information in Beijing, which further impairs the communication effect with foreign tourists and lessens Beijing's charm in the international community.According to functionalism, the translation theory originated in Germany, the target text's function and purpose should be realized in the target readers. Anything that hampers this realization would be regarded as a translation problem, and an inadequate solution to a translation problem as a translation error. In her book Translating as a Purposeful Activity, Nord classified translation problems and errors as pragmatics, cultural, linguistic and text-specific ones. In order to study the translation problems and errors in tourist information, the author visits several scenic spots in Beijing and collects data to set up a corpus. Study of the small corpus shows translation problems and errors in tourist information are mainly linguistic and cultural.Based on functionalism, the thesis sub-classifies and analyzes the common translation problems and errors mentioned above, and provides suggestions for revision. Furthermore, the author analyzes and summarizes the causes for those problems and errors. In translating, translators are influenced by the source language structure, source readers' thinking mode and cultural background. The failure in target-language and target-reader orientation causes translation problems and errors of various kinds, which make target text unacceptable to target readers.Last, on the basis of the above analysis and the translator training theory of functionalism, the author provides suggestions for C-E translation of tourist information and the translator training.Collected from the scenic spots in Beijing, the data analyzed in this thesis are real and representative. They show the status quo of the C-E translation of tourist information in Beijing. The author sincerely hopes this study could invite attention to the quality improvement of C-E translation in this field so as to exert the best publicizing and communicating effects of tourist information.