Transposition For Faithfulness In Chinese-English Tourist Translation From The Functionalist Perspective

With the success of Beijing's bid for the Olympic Games in 2008 and China's entry into the World Trade Organization in 2001, an ever-increasing number of overseas visitors are coming to China. The tour boom culminates in the prediction that by 2020 China will become the No.1 destination spot in the world. Apparently tourist translation especially from Chinese to English, as an effective means to exchange ideas and culture and promote understanding among different countries and nations, plays an important and active role. But unfortunately invalidity of translation may constantly prohibit the smooth understanding of target readers, naturally cause the failure of achievement of communicative functions and finally make intrusion on the development of tourism industry. Questions remaining unsolved in translational practice call for an appropriate theory to give a strong support. The functionalist theory, advocated by a group of German scholars including Nord, appeared just in response to the need of practice. It holds that translation is fundamentally operated under a purposeful action; in the frame of the functionalist theory, translation strategy can and even should be allowed to transpose; adequacy in achievement of communicative effect is put forward as a new criterion for translation. In general, the thesis is introduced in view that the correlation between tourist translation and the theory will solve some problematic points which confuse us today by representing some non-orthodox translation skills for the maximum faithfulness, named transposition in the thesis. As for the research method, the thesis is developed mainly by means of linguistics with emphases on extralinguistic factors such as economy, culture and socially receptive degree, etc. and is simultaneously guided under the principle of combining theory and practice & theory and reality.The thesis begins with the fact that tourism is, from its definite beginning, associated with a certain clear-cut purpose or purposes in its chronological history, along with instinct characteristics in purposes and functions ect. However, just the ignorance of what is mentioned above causes a series of translation problems, which the author classifies them into four types, namely pragmatic translation problems, cultural translation problems, linguistic translation problems and text-specific translation problems, all providing a premise to unfold the following. The second chapter makes a study on the functionalist theory which is composed of"three principles,""four types of text function,""two functionalist translation strategies"and a criterion"adequacy."On this basis, the next chapter is but a necessary part which makes a bridge between tourist translation activity and the theory. The author finds out that tourism texts in the...