Functionalist Approaches To C-E Tourist Translation

The booming international tourist industry in China has given rise for the need of well-translated tourist texts to provide quality traveling information for foreign tourists and attract more foreigners to travel China.Tourism publicity materials play an important role in international tourist industry.The function of tourism texts is to attract potential tourists. However,many English versions of Chinese tourist texts are far from being satisfactory and fall to achieve the function as intended.Therefore,tourist translation deserves an in-depth study.This research centering on Quanzhou tourist rescources attempts to find ways of bettering the publicity effects of tourism texts through translation through a functional approach.The author attempts,by applying functionalist translation theory to make a research into the status of Quanzhou tourist translation through case studies to seek effective ways of improving the translation quality of Quanzhou tourism.Functionalism is a broad term including German Skopos Theory,Nida's principle of dynamic functional equivalence and Newmark's text-type classifications and semantic vs. communicative translation.Functionalism holds that the successful translation is the ones which can achieve the intended function in the target context.The major function of tourism texts is vocative function.From functional approach,original texts are regarded as "source of information" which can be adapted and adjusted.Thus,the key of translating tourism texts is to fulfill the intended vocative function,i.e.to attract readers to visit China.This study compares the cultural and linguistic differences between Chinese and English tourism texts by using many tourist materials in Fujian's Quanzhou.Here in the thesis cultural differences refer to the distinctions in aesthetic conventions,values and customs.The comparison of linguistic features;especially in style,is a study based on actual tourist materials in actual use in Quanzhou.It is concluded that the Chinese tourism texts tend to employ flowery diction,rhetoric devices and abundant quotation of Chinese allusions,while English texts are always organized in a concise and informal way.Based on these differences,this study points out that tourist translation should conform to the principle of functional equivalence to fulfill the vocative function.Owing to great differences in language and culture,the translation process usually involves considerable adjustments or adaptations of the source text in order to activate the intended function of the target text.It is suggested that for the intended function,a translator can adopt the different translation strategies under the principle of functionalist approaches.