Translation Errors And Problems In Tourism Literature-Skopos Theory

As a tourism country, China has vast territory and abundant resources. The natural, cultural and historic landscapes have attracted more and more tourists from home and abroad. China's tourism has fully advanced along with the development of reform and opening up. In pace with the burgeoning development of inbound tourism in China, translation of Chinese tourism brochures has aroused increasing attention of translation theorists and practitioners. Foreign tourists know about China's tourist recourses and culture through tourist information, so Chinese-English (C-E) translation plays an important role in cross-cultural communication.Based on the language functions explicated by German psychologist Karl Buhler, Katharina Reiss, Peter Newmark and Christina Nord have proposed their own text typology respectively. A comparative discourse analysis on a certain amount of parallel tourist texts manifested that Chinese tourism texts feature informative and expressive functions while their counterparts are informative and appealing. Because of the diverse tourism traditions, Chinese tourism texts and those in English have adopted two vastly different ways to trigger tourists' impulse: the former with expressive descriptions and the latter with appealing persuasions.With an aim to motivate readers to pay visits, the author suggested transforming the expressive landscape descriptions to appealing persuasions.The translation problems and errors in tourist information are mainly linguistic and cultural. The thesis sub-classifies and analyzes the common translation problems and errors mentioned above, and provide suggestions for revision. Furthermore, the author analyzes and summarizes the causes for those problems and errors. In translating, translators are influenced by the source language structure, target readers' thinking mode and cultural background. The failure in target-language and target-reader orientation causes translation problems and errors of various kinds, which makes target text unacceptable to target readers.Finally, based on the above analysis and the theory of functionalism, the author provides suggestions for C-E translation of tourist information.