A Study On C-E Translation Strategy Of Cultural Information Of Tourism Text

The frequent international exchanges and fascinating Chinese culture promote the development of tourism industry. The position of tourism in the economy has been rising. The main purpose of foreign tourists visiting China is to experience and appreciate unique Chinese culture, such as historical culture, religious culture and customs, etc. Tourism text is the fundamental tool for target readers to learn Chinese culture. Nowadays, English is widely used and accepted worldwide. Therefore, the translation quality of tourism text is highlighted. Effective English translation of tourism text can arouse potential visitors'interest in visiting China, maintain effective communication between Chinese and foreign tourists, and help foreign tourists to better understand Chinese culture.One of the essential features of tourism text is its unique cultural features. The translation of cultural information plays basic and critical role in the translation quality of the whole tourism text. Moreover, context determines the ways to understand meaning, especially under different cultural backgrounds. Hence, the ability to deal with context properly is needed in the translation of cultural information of tourism text. Jualine House's theory of recontextualization is a concept of constructing context in translation. House (2006) defines recontextualization as"taking out of original set of context and put it in a new set of relationships and culturally-conditioned expectations"(p356). She also indicates two translation strategies guided by recontextualization: overt translation strategy and covert translation strategy. Aiming to improve the translation quality of tourism text, this thesis explores effective strategy for C-E translation of cultural information of tourism text based on the theory of recontextalization, so that culture facsimile and equivalent pragmatic meaning will be met.By comparative analysis on the source cultural context and target cultural context, and the conveyed pragmatic meaning of the collected samples, the author finds out that some target texts conveys inadequate, obscure and misleading information. The main reasons that caused those problems are: unfaithfulness to source texts and improper reconstructing of cultural context from the perspective of target readers in the encoding process.Finally, this thesis maintains that applying recontextualization proposed by Jualine House to the C-E translation of cultural information of tourism text involves hidden interactions between writer and reader in the mind of translator. The process of recontextualization consists of the following parts: the full understanding of cultural context of source texts, and taking out the original cultural context to construct a set of new contexts. The translator should understand the cultural context of source texts in the process of decoding, according to the cultural information and its writing time. Full and accurate comprehension of source text makes preparation for recontextualization in encoding to obtain informative and vocative functions of source text. This thesis proposes overt-oriented translation strategy for C-E translation of cultural information of tourism text. Under the principles of culture facsimile and pragmatic meaning equivalence, the overt translation plays dominant role which is supplemented by covert translation to obtain informative and vocative functions in C-E translation of cultural information of tourism text. Specifically speaking, based on the overall comprehension of source cultural context, translation methods as literal translation with explanatory information, transliteration with explanatory information, combination of literal translation and transliteration, free translation, and generalization should be adopted to reconstruct new contexts.