The English Translation Of Chinese Tourist Texts From The Perspective Of Translational Norms

Translation has long been conceived normative both at home and abroad. Since its beginning, translation theories have consisted of restrictive guidelines on how to translate. However, in recent decades, the assumption that prescriptive rules should be established for translator to follow has increasingly been questioned, and many scholars have attempted to explore translation in descriptive ways.Gideon Toury's rationale for descriptive translation studies is one of such theories. He takes translation as a norm-governed activity, that is, translation is governed by historical, social and cultural factors in different languages and cultures. Translational norms, the core of his theory, are different from absolute general rules and pure idiosyncrasies. And the norms are unsettled and multiple. Thus, the translators do not need to stick to the complete equivalence of source texts.China is rich in tourism resources. On the one hand, tourism industry has been developed prosperously. On the other hand, good and awkward tourism translations coexist with each other, which exert great influence on the tourism. Thus it is badly in need of a practical theory.Based on Toury's theory on translational norms, this paper makes contrastive and comparative analysis of Chinese and English parallel texts to establish norms in translating tourist texts from Chinese to English and give implication to future translation. It is found that, to fulfill the persuasive function of tourist texts, translators should adhere to norms of the target culture in translating from Chinese to English.