Restructuring Of Linguistic And Cultural Information In Chinese-English Translation Of Tourism Texts-A Register Theory Perspective

Tourism, an important means of cross-cultural communication, exerts great influence upon people's life in many aspects. Translation plays a very important role in tourism, providing useful information to overseas tourists and encouraging them to visit these destinations. On the whole, abundant researches have been conducted on the translation of tourism texts. A lot of scholars both at home and abroad have done many fruitful researches in this respect and the strategies they propose will undoubtedly improve the quality of tourism translation. However, due to various reasons, the status quo of the study on tourism translation is still far from satisfactory. Researches related to the theories of tourism translation are not often seen, not to mention systematic researches in this regard. Motivated by this inadequacy, the author decides to choose the present subject for further study.Tourism texts are of a special text type, possessing their own characteristics and containing a large amount of information in them. It is well known that language and culture are closely interrelated and understanding of one requires that of the other. Translating tourism texts from Chinese to English will inevitably involve the knowledge of two different cultures. The linguistic and cultural differences between Chinese and English are reflected clearly in the tourism texts. The different cultural backgrounds in which Chinese and Western readers live lead to the different distribution, emphasis and structure of information in the tourism texts. Obviously, it is very difficult to maintain the information structure of the source text in the target text, so the restructuring of information is needed.The translation of tourism text is related to and influenced by register, specifically speaking, influenced by the three variables of register, i.e. field, mode and tenor. Since the three variables of register are correspondingly in relation to the three metafiinctions of language in Systematic-Functional Grammar, i.e. ideational meaning, interpersonal meaning and textual meaning, the author intends to carry out a study on the influence of the three variables upon the restructuring of information by relating to the three metafiinctions.The present thesis aims to explore the principles of making such restructuring in tourism texts with special regard to register theory. Through the analysis, the author intends to provide possible explanations and principles of the restructuring of linguistic and cultural information in C-E translation of tourism texts. The thesis is not only conducive to the practical tourism translation but also to the research of general translation theories.