Tourism Culture Translation In Cognitive Perspective

This thesis studies the problems in tourism culture translation, mainly from Chinese to English, based on the theories of cross-cultural communication and cognitive psychology with the help of cognitive factors in other translation theories. It is aimed to find a better method to guide the translating practice.The tourism reflects the features of a certain region or people while in the whole it collects the world and all nations. Nowadays, people are not satisfied with enjoying the natural scene but expect to learn the culture behind every magic site. Culture is a wide concept, involving nearly all the aspects of social science, such as history, arts (sculpture, drawing and music), architecture, religion, and folk-custom and so on. In addition to the complex character of culture itself, the culture gap between the East and the West is so huge that it makes the tourism culture translation between Chinese and English more difficult.Many translation theorists and translators have proposed various translation theories and methods to solve the cultural problem. They mainly study this problem from linguistics, text analysis, pragmatics and other angles. But a deeper factor: the cognitive psychology is ignored. Travel is a kind of cognition about the nature environment and social environment which also follows the cognitive laws. According to human being's cognitive characteristics, the cognitive abilities could be divided into two parts: the general and the special cognitions. The general cognition refers to the cognitive abilities acquired by the same physical structure and the same living activities. That is what the whole human beings have shared. Therefore it is easy to be accepted and understood. The special cognition refers to the cognition acquired through special life experience. living environment, national customs, education background and social status and so on. Different people have different special cognition that is also called cognitive model. These two kinds of cognition can be used together in the tourism culture translation: we can explain the cultural factors with the general cognition and introduce the cultural features with special cognition. This thesis also collected many cases form the tourism sites to illustrate the application of cognitive translation method. It is expected to be helpful in the tourism culture translation.It is divided into five chapters. In the first chapter, it introduces tourism culture and tourism culture translation. Though culture translating has a long history, the tourism culture translating is a new product. It belongs to practical translation and involves in the cross-culture communication carrying many characters of its own. The second chapter is the translation theories, mainly discusses four branches of translation theory and their guidance on tourism culture translation. This chapter mainly emphasized the cognitive factors among each theory. The third chapter introduces the translation method of tourism culture under the cognitive psychology and cognitive linguistics theory. In this chapter, a new translating method is discussed: the cognitive method. These three chapters are the theory basis of the thesis. The fourth chapter analyzes the cognitive translation method with practical examples, mainly introducing the natural and man-made tourism resources, and emphasis on the man-made resource culture translation: the architecture, the arts (includes the drawing, carvings, and folk arts), and folk-customs. The last chapter is a conclusion, giving a summary of the whole thesis and proposing solutions toward the current tourism culture translation problems.This thesis is expected to find the cognitive translating method applied in the tourism cultural translation process. It is expected to help the translators and tourist guides to spread our outstanding culture and history and also provide the translation theorists with a different point of view.