On Foregrounding Theme-Relevant Information In Chinese To English Translation Of Tourism Materials

As a supporting service for tourism, tourism translation must function for the interest of the industry. The rationality of foregrounding theme-relevant information lies in two points—meeting tourists' psychology and demands and adapting to their reading and writing habits. Also, the manipulation finds support in cybernetics and studies on the receiver in the field of information transmission in respect of possibility, necessity and feasibility.Theme tour has become a highlight of tourism in the past century, because tourists have gradually lost interest in traditional tourist products without distinctive features. In order to stand firm in fierce competition, travel agencies and organizations must develop tours with unique features that suit the tourists' tastes and financial situations. Therefore features must be fore-grounded in tourism materials accordingly to attract tourists.Secondly, foregrounding theme-relevant information also aims at complying with readers' reading and writing habits. Reading is a self-selective process refined not only by the reader's own culture, which indicates that he must identify with the reading and writing norms of his own culture, but also influenced by the habit(s) that he forms on his own. As we know, highlighting theme-relevant information is an outstanding feature of English writing. Furthermore, confronted with data glut, readers have gradually developed a habit of shallow reading. Therefore, foregrounding theme-relevant information also helps distinguish a tourist attraction from numerous others.In the thesis, theme-relevant information refers to information relevant to the features of the attraction. Regarding the demands of tourists and characteristics of Chinese tourism materials and other factors, two translation principles are established. The first is that theme-relevant information should be rendered as precise and intact as possible while the quantity of other information must be properly controlled to prevent obliteration of the theme. And the other is, complying with informationarrangement of the English language as well as the language style of English tourism materials.Discussions are conducted from four aspects. They are, respectively, reconstruction and translation at the text level, and translation of cultural information, descriptive and evaluative information and ideological information.