An Analysis Of Tourist Material Translations In Chongqing-A Functional Approach

With the exciting economic development in China and globalization, a growing number of tourists from abroad are eager to know more about China's tourist attractions and cultural highlights. Therefore, the translation activities related to tourism are both necessary and important. Referential and appellative functions are the two essential functions of tourist texts, which is also the reason why tourist texts differ from other literary texts. Traditionally, translation is regarded as a tool enabling people speaking different languages to communicate with each other, and therefore, translation should be as faithful as possible to the source texts on the linguistic level, which,however, can decrease the function of tourist texts.Chongqing, one of the most important big cities in China, is attracting more and more visitors from abroad. However, a considerable number of Chinese-English (C-E) translations of the tourist information in local tourism are far from being satisfactory, a fact which negatively affects the communicative purpose with foreign visitors. This thesis, adopting descriptive translation studies and German functional approaches, is attempting to study C-E translations of tourist information from a new perspective. Oriented towards target texts and culture, functionalism adopts a translation strategy which satisfies the target context. This thesis, by studying information collected in scenic spots, points out some recurring problems and errors in translations of tourist information in Chongqing and gives a different translation for each. According to functionalism, the focus of translation is its acceptability. Therefore the target culture, language and the thinking patterns of the receivers have to be considered in the process of translation. Besides, translators must have the right to make some adaptations without venturing too far from the source texts.Eventually, this thesis tries to put forward some advice for translator training and draws the translator's attention to the improvement of the quality of C-E translations in tourist information.