Pragmatic Equivalence And Its Application In The Translation Of Scenic Spot Introduction

More and more foreign tourists come to China to do business andtravel. Accordingly, Chinese tourism is booming. As an effective way topublicize China and promote Chinese tourism, tourist literature becomesmore and more important. The study of tourist literature is a new topic.New linguistic theories have been employed to study this special topic. InChina, scholars have studied the translation of Chinese tourist literaturefrom different aspects recent years, but few do it comprehensively andthoroughly. The current study uses Pragmatic Equivalence Theory tostudy the Chinese-English translation of scenic spot introduction which isa challenging try. (Because of the variety of tourist translation, the authorhas only chosen one typical aspect as the study object, that is the scenicspot introduction).Certainly, the existence of the Chinese wand Western culturaldifferences has brought many obstacles to translation. As to she greatcultural differences between source language and target language, manytranslators have put forward the concept of Pragmatics Translation. Asingle language unit can only express the language information of oneunit, if the language information that this unit expresses exceeds a unit,the part that has gone beyond is the very object which Pragmatics studies, that is the pragmatic force. The inequivalenve of the characteristics of thegrammar, the scene and the culture background produces the pragmaticforce. Thus the translators must have a good knowledge of the two kindsof cultural differences, and understand the pragmatic force of sourcelanguage appropriately to make the original language and the targetlanguage come into equivalence finally.The pragmatic translation is a kind of equivalent translation theoryfrom pragmatic perspective. It solves the cross-cultural communicationproblem by means of equivalence. This paper frames on such a theory,studies on some tourist materials and analyzes the problems withPragmatic Equivalence Approach in this kind of translation. And then theauthor puts forward some translation strategies such as domestication andforeignization in order to improve the quality of the translation in touristmaterials, no matter domestication or foreignization, or the combinationof both, the most suitable way is the best way. Translation strategy, tosome extent, is decided by the purpose or intention of translation. Whentranslating tourist materials, cultural "fidelity" and "readability" are bothindispensable factors, but the former is given more preference so as topromote long-term mutual understandings.There are five chapters in this thesis. It begins with a briefintroduction of pragmatic equivalence, including its historicaldevelopment, the concept and its classification. Chapter 2 connects pragmatic equivalence with translation and studies the importance, theconditions and the embodiments of pragmatic equivalence in translation.Chapter 3 points out the cultural nature of the translation of scenic spotintroduction from a cross-cultural perspective and then introduces severalkinds of its text types. Chapter 4 analyzes some problems of the recenttranslation of scenic spot introduction in tourism from pragmaticequivalence. Chapter 5 introduces the notions of domestication andforeignization and their dialectical relationship and calls for the adoptionof them in order to improve the quality of the translation in touristmaterials. At last, the paper concludes that no matter domestication orforeignization, or the combination of both, the most suitable way is thebest way. Which approach is to be adopted is decided by the purpose orfunction of a translation in the target cultural context.