English Translation Of Tourism Text From The Perspective Of Text Function

With the frequent communication between China and the rest of the world, more and more foreigners have come to China, which has great influence on the development of domestic tourism industry. Meanwhile, almost all the provinces around China that have tourist resources take tourism development as a new way to promote economy and they are considering how to attract visitors to their own tourist spots. Therefore, English translation of Chinese tourism text, as a window to foreign publicity has become an important part of tourist strategy and has gradually drawn many scholars' attention.The study of tourism translation is a relatively new topic. In recent years, it has been conducted in combination with the newest achievements made in linguistic field, focusing on cross-cultural analysis and genre analysis of tourism materials. However, modem linguistics, largely focusing on language itself, at or below the sentence level, has been far from enough to provide a satisfactory tool to tourism translation study, for translation goes beyond the syntactic level and concerns the whole text. Translation is far more than a linguistic process and must be based on texts as an integrated whole. As a result, it is indispensable to study translation from text level.This paper, evolved around three functions in tourism text, is intended to explore English translation of Chinese tourism text from a new angle: text function. In doing so, the paper attempts to find out the effective methods applied to tourism translation by comparing the differences and similarities between Chinese tourism text and English tourism text. The author hopes that the research conducted in the present paper would not only offer insights into tourism translation and enlightenment to the further study on this specific field but also test the applicability of text function in tourism text and other texts.For these purposes, the paper, divided into five parts, deals with the following issues. The first chapter, Chapter 1, is a literature review which deals with relevant studies home and abroad, research methods applied, as well as research gap which leads to the proposal of a study from text function perspective.The second chapter provides some basic knowledge about text and text function, which serves as the theoretical basis for this study.Chapter three classifies text functions and defines three text functions employed in both Chinese and English tourism text. The fact that both Chinese tourism text and English tourism text have the same function proves the translatability between them. However, as two different languages, they may have different ways to achieve the three functions, which is the focus of Chapter Four.In Chapter four, the author makes a contrastive study between Chinese and English tourism text in order to explore the different ways of achieving the same function, which serves as a preparation for the discussion of translation principle and strategies.Based on the differences found out in achieving these three functions, Chapter Five is devoted to discussing the corresponding translation methods for these functions such as adjustment, remolding and rewriting for directive function, addition and explanation for informative function, and specification and generalization for descriptive function.