C-E Tourism Translation From The Perspective Of Functionalism

In recent years,China's tourism market has developed rapidly,attracting more and more foreign visitors.Tourism translation plays an increasingly important role in further promoting internationalization of China's tourism.Although the quality of tourism translation has been improved a lot,there still exist many poor-translated versions.Therefore,the discussion of how to improve tourism translation is of great realistic significance.The present thesis applies the functionalist theory to the translation of Chinese tourism materials into English.To begin with,the author gives the definition of tourism and tourism text,and then analyzes the function of tourism text and its translation.Reviewing the related translation theories about tourism texts both in China and abroad,the author reckons that the translation of Chinese tourism materials aims at providing information for foreign tourists with a view to facilitating their visit in China and attracting more tourists to the country so as to promote China's tourism economy and enhance mutual understanding between Chinese people and the people from the rest of the world.Based on this purpose,the author suggests that the translator should take into consideration the text type of tourism materials,observing the general translation skopos in the process of translation.Based upon the functionalist theory of translation,this thesis also analyzes the English versions of some Chinese tourism materials and indicates that the common problems mainly fall into three categories,namely,linguistic,pragmatic and cultural translation problems.The main causes behind these problems,from the perspective of functionalist,are attributed to the ignorance of the purpose of translation and target readers on the part of the translator as well as his or her lack of cross-cultural awareness.With the aim of realizing the purpose of tourism translation,this thesis suggests that the translation should be tourist-oriented and aims at promoting Chinese culture. Accordingly,this thesis proposes a number of translation strategies,including transliteration plus explanation,adding,omission,analogy and rewriting.It is hoped that the present study will be of some help for the improvement of the translation of Chinese tourism materials,and eventually be of a little help for the promotion of the development of our tourism.