Functionalist Approaches To C-E Translation Of Tourist Texts

In recent years, China's tourism market is being continually improved, attracting more and more foreign visitors. Tourism translation is playing an increasingly important role in further promoting internationalization of China's tourism. Tourism translation includes the translation of tourist texts (written translation) and oral interpretation. In recent years, the quality of tourism translation has been improved a lot; however, there are still many poor tourism translations. So, it is a very meaningful job to explore how to improve the quality of tourism translation. This thesis is designed to study C-E translation of tourist texts from functionalist approaches, focusing on how to create a translated text that is accessible to the target-language readers. The author hopes that the study would be helpful for the people who are engaged in tourism translation and tourism translation teaching.Translation is a complicated process, involving not only linguistic transfer but also cultural transfer. It is impossible to describe and explain all the translation problems encountered merely from linguistic approaches. It would be true that the act of translating should be located in the socio-cultural context in which it occurs. In recent years, translation scholars began to embark on translation studies from different approaches, which lead to the appearance of many powerful theories. The functionalist approaches to translation studies, appearing in Germany in the 1970s, are considered be very appropriate for the translation of non-literary texts because they could incorporate the cultural and pragmatic factors very well. German functionalist approaches can function as the macro-level principle for almost all types of translations. However, translation is a special process of linguistic transfer, in which the linguistics theories, especially the theories of discourse analysis are still needed to investigate how people use the language for a special purpose in a given context, and identify the translation problems. So, the thesis attempts to study C-E translation of tourist texts from functionalist approaches, which include: (i) German functionalist approaches, which are based on Buhler's model of language function; (ii)British functionalist approaches, which are based on Halliday's systemic-functional model, and pragmatics (张美芳,2005:12). In the thesis, German functionalist approaches are employed to determine the translation criteria, that is:"The translation of tourist texts should be oriented towards the target-language readers, and both form and content should be adjusted to the needs and expectations of the target-language readers". And British functionalist approaches are used to make systematic comparisons of the function-relevant elements, which leads to the following translation problems: (i) how to deal with the difference in grammatical structures (ii) how to deal with the difference in culture– specific genre expectations; (iii) how to deal with the difference in cultural knowledge which may require an adjustment of the relationship between explicit and implicit information in the text (Nord 1997: 63-68). After this analysis, the translation strategies are proposed in terms of the translation criteria.It can be shown that the appropriateness of functionalist approaches for C-E translation of tourist texts lies in: (i) It can help determine the translation criteria; (ii) It can help identify the function-relevant translation problems for the translator to take appropriate translation strategies; (iii) It can help explain the translator's decision. So, the author points out that functionalist approaches are very appropriate for the translation of tourist texts.