A Study Of C-E Translation Of Tourist Materials At Scenic Spots In Qingdao

Nowadays, more and more people expect to appreciate unique scenery and learn exotic cultures of different areas and countries thus tourism is becoming one of the largest industries in the world. China is no exception. With the rapid development of its society and the speeding up of opening to the outside world, China's tourism is developing faster and faster. It is expected that this country will be the world's largest tourist destination and the fourth major source of tourist by the year 2020. Moreover, the entry into WTO and the success of bid for the 2008 Olympics enable China to have more tourists from abroad, which provide the country with both opportunities and challenges.One of the challenges is whether China has done or prepared enough to welcome visitors of different languages and cultures. Since scenic spots, no matter natural scenery or human landscape or historical sites, are always likened windows of an area, translations of the written materials there seem to be of great importance. It is known to all that only qualified translations could facilitate and attract foreign visitors to better know the tourist destinations and the people, histories and cultures related. Otherwise, if the translations fail to meet the requirements of facilitating and attracting, they will not only make the scenic areas loose visitors but break their images as well.Bearing this in mind, the present author does a research on the Chinese-English translation of tourist materialsâ‘ at scenic spots in Qingdao which is the co-host city of Beijing Olympics, and produces this thesis.Although many books and papers have been published concerning tourist texts translation, most of them focus on texts from tourist guides or publicity materials or even the Internet. This thesis conducts an overall investigation and analysis of the materials written for tourists at scenic spots. Most examples cited by the thesis are collected from Qingdao tourist destinations by the author and materials cover direction and warning signs, instructions and explanatory notices as well as introductory materials in which many kinds of problems can be found.The thesis uses functional translation theories especially text typology theory and Skopos theory as its framework to conduct the study. The thesis divides the tourist materials at scenic spots into 1) direction and warning signs; 2) explanatory notices; 3) introductory materials. Then through analysis of different kinds of texts at scenic spots from such perspectives as text type, diversities between C&E languages and cultures, the skopos of the TT as well as the TT receivers'responses, etc., the thesis puts forward some translation strategies: using English equivalences and imitating, full translating, literal translation plus explanation, transliteration plus explanation, summarization and rewriting.