A Functionalist Approach To Tourism Texts Translation

Tourism texts, as an effective publicity tool, play an important role in China's international communication and tourism promotion. Translation of tourism texts aims mainly at attracting foreign tourists and introducing Chinese culture to them. However, this most important function of translation could not be well achieved in that current English translated versions are of poor quality. Within the framework of functionalist translation theory, this thesis makes a detailed study on Chinese-English tourism texts translation, aiming to find factors leading to the poor quality of translation. Available ways used to improve the translation are discussed as well.In the process of translating Chinese tourism texts, a translator should take target readers' expectations and the purpose of translation into full consideration. Original texts, functioning as one of the various sources of information, can be adjusted or even adapted to fulfill the intended function of the target text in the target situation, and hence the success in attracting foreign tourists to visit China.Tourism texts translation is not only a conversion of two languages, but also a communication between two cultures. Therefore, cultural factors are also very important in tourism texts translation. The thesis makes a contrastive analysis of Chinese and English tourism texts and finds that the major differences between them can be summarized as follows. Firstly, they are different in information focus. CTT show more concern for tourist destinations in terms of their social status, descriptions of scenery, etc., while ETT focus on practical information about geographical environment, service, facilities, advantages and disadvantages of the attractions. Secondly, CTT and ETT differ greatly in describing travel attractions. Pompous in diction and diversified in rhetorical devices, Chinese writing is always rich in magnificent descriptions together with the writer's personal feelings, carrying little practical information. In contrast, descriptions in ETT are written in an objective and succinct way. Concrete words and plain modifiers are used to provide a real picture of the scenery for tourists. Thirdly, CTT and ETT have their own distinctive syntactic features. Chinese sentences are characterized by loose structures whereas English sentences, featured by well-knit sentence structures, lay great emphasis on cohesion by grammatical devices. Fourthly, there are discrepancies between CTT and ETT in formality as well. CTT are more formal than ETT. Based on these differences, a translator is expected to take the features of ETT into account in translating so as to produce a translation that is in line with foreign tourists' expectations.The thesis also finds that major problems of current English translated versions can be induced to the following three points: 1) Information unimportant for target readers is not played down or omitted in translation; 2) important practical information expected by target readers is not provided when necessary; 3) in many cases the word-for-word translation method leads to rigid and verbose translation. The main reason for these problems lies in the fact that the translator doesn't take target readers' reading habits or expectations into full consideration. To solve the problems, communicative translation is strongly recommended to achieve the intended effect of publicity. In line with this approach, a translator can adopt techniques like adding, omitting, paraphrasing, cultural analogy, combination and division, etc. to make the translation cater for the taste of foreign tourists.