Functionalist Approaches To Chinese-English Translation Of Tourism Publicity Materials

With the pace of globalization accelerating, and Beijing Olympic Games and Shanghai World Expo ahead, China is expected to receive an increasing number of international tourists, which, in turn, makes C-E translation of tourism publicity materials more and more important. Tourism publicity materials have very obvious operative and informative functions. The intended purposes of the English versions are to provide international tourists with travel-related information or to provoke certain reactions on the part of the addressees. Tourism publicity translation, if properly done, can not only expand China's inbound tourism, but also play a major role in building new bridges of understanding between China and other countries, which can ultimately enhance China's global profile.The status quo of C-E translation of tourism publicity materials, however, is far from being satisfactory. Errors, combined with printing mistakes, inevitably obstruct the successful conveyance of messages, and in the worst cases, would adversely affect China's international image. C-E translation of tourism publicity materials has thus become a topic of increasing scholarly concern. This thesis approaches the problem from a German functionalist perspective, arguing that functionalist approaches provide powerful insights into tourism publicity translation.The major contribution of functionalist approaches to translation is the introduction of the intended function or purpose of the target text as the decisive criterion of any translation project, and thus, also of translation quality assessment. Such concepts are extremely enlightening and applicable to tourism publicity translation which has very obvious purposes.This thesis exemplifies that functionalist translation theory can not only guide the decision-making process in tourism publicity translation, but also provide insights into the quality assessment of the translated versions. The functionalist definition and classification of translation errors are particularly helpful in identifying and analyzing the errors contained in the translated versions. Functionalist translation theory also justifies the adoption of certain translation methods, such as addition and deletion, in rendering tourism publicity materials. Considering that Chinese and English tourism publicity materials differ in rhetorical devices and style convention, and that source and target text addressees have very different cultural knowledge, translators should take into account the ultimate purpose of the text to be produced and aspects of different cultures so as to produce functionally adequate target texts.