A Research On Translation Of Tourist Texts From The Perspective Of Skopostheroie

With the coming of Olympic Games in 2008, an ever-increasing number of overseas visitors are coming to China. Apparently, tourist translation especially, from Chinese into English, plays an important and active role in exchanging ideas and culture and enhancing understanding among different countries and nations. However, the invalidity of translation may constantly prohibit the smooth understanding of the target readers, naturally may cause the failure of communication and finally make intrusion on the development of tourism industry. The existing situation is that many English translations of Chinese tourist texts are far from satisfactory and fail to achieve their intended functions. So Chinese-English tourist translation deserves an in-depth study.The thesis aims at applying the Skopostheorie of translation to the translation of Chinese tourist materials into English in order to solve the current existing translation problems. The Skopostheorie was developed to meet the growing needs of translating non-literary text types in the 1970's, and the tourist information texts fall into this category. According to the Skopostheorie, the top-ranking rule for any translation is the "Skopos rule", which says that a translation action is determined by its Skopos, this is "the end justifies the means". The author of this thesis holds that the translation of Chinese tourist materials aims at providing some information for foreign tourists with a view to facilitating their visit in China and attracting more tourists to the country so as to help promote China's tourist economy and enhance the mutual understanding between the Chinese people and other peoples in the world. Based on this purpose, he also suggests that the translator should take the function and text type of tourist materials into consideration and try to observe the corresponding translation brief when doing the Chinese-English tourist translation.The author has also analyzed some current existing problems in tourist translation, then, try to analyze the causes behind these problems from the perspective of Skopostheorie, he finds that these problems are mainly due to the inadequate awareness of translation purpose, ignorance of text functions and target readers and overemphasis on "Equivalence".So in the translation process, the translator is required to bear in mind the intended function of the target text and produce a translation that is comprehensible and acceptable to the target reader. Owing to great differences in language and culture, the translation process usually involves considerable adjustments or adaptations of the source text in order to achieve the intended functions of the target text. Here, he proposes a number of translation techniques for tourist translation from the viewpoint of Skopostheorie including omission, amplification, adaptation, analogy and literal translation. It is hoped that the present study will be of some help for the improvement of Chinese-English tourist translation as well as the teaching of C-E tourist translation, and eventually be of a little help for the promotion of our tourist industry.