A Functional Approach To The C-E Translation Of Tourism Texts

Tourism publicity materials play an important role in international tourism industry. The function of tourism texts is to attract potential tourists. However, China's tourism texts written in English are not effective in this aspect mainly because most of the tourism texts are not well translated. This research attempts to find ways of bettering the publicity effects of tourism texts through translation in a functional approach.Functionalism is a broad term including German Skopos Theory, Nida's principle of dynamic/functional equivalence and Newmark's text-type classifications and semantic vs. communicative translation. Functionalism holds that the successful translation is the ones which can achieve the intended function in the target context. The major function of tourism texts is vocative function. From functional approach, original texts are regarded as "source of information" which can be adapted and adjusted. Thus, the key of translating tourism texts is to fulfill the intended vocative function, i.e. to attract readers to visit China.This study compares the cultural and linguistic differences between Chinese and English tourism texts. Cultural differences refer to the distinctions in aesthetic conventions, values and customs. The comparison of linguistic features, both in style and content, is a study based on corpus. It is concluded that the Chinese tourism texts tend to employ flowery diction, rhetoric devices and abundant quotation of Chinese allusions, while English texts are always organized in a concise and informal way. In addition, they also differ in the angle of view in description and focus of information: Chinese tourism texts often use changing angle of view to describe mental pictures while an effective English tourism text depends on consistent angle of view and objective description. In providing various kinds of information, Chinese and English tourism texts also have different focuses.Based on these differences, this study points out that tourism translation should conform to the principle of functional equivalence to fulfill the vocative function. It is suggested that to achieve the intended function, a translator can adopt the following translation strategies: omitting, adding, blending, paraphrasing and rewriting.