German Functionalist Approach To C-E Translation Of Sichuan Intangible Cultural Heritage Text

China's foreign publicity has developed quickly since China's reform and opening up to the outside world. The Chinese-English (C-E) translation in publicity domain plays an important role in the enhancement of mutual understanding and the dissemination of Chinese culture worldwide.Sichuan, a province rich in natural and cultural resources, attracts a large number of foreign tourists every year. However, there are many problems and errors in C-E translation of Sichuan tourist information, especially of intangible cultural heritage, which is a great obstacle to the cross-cultural communication and deteriorates Sichuan's charm in the international community. How to improve the quality of the translation is an urgent problem we are faced with now.According to German functionalist approaches, the target text's function should be realized in the target readers. The most appropriate strategy is then to be adopted to fulfill the initiator's purpose. Based on the introduction of the characteristics of ICH, the text analysis in this study is done in detail according to German functionalist approaches, esp. Nord's model in text analysis in translation. The author chooses some typical ICH texts and makes an analysis of translation-related aspects from intratexual and extratexual perspective respectively. Through the comparison between the source text and target text, the translation errors in the ICH text are divided into three types including linguistic errors, pragmatic errors and cultural errors.According to these errors, the author proposes some principles for ICH translation. It is suggested that in ICH translation, we cannot simply make a decision as to whether to adopt domestication or foreignization. Text function and the readers are decisive factors in this decision-making. Because of the consistency between Reiss's translation criticism model and Nord's model, both of them can be used as criteria to assess the ICH translation quality.The author sincerely hopes this study could invite attention to the quality improvement of C-E translation in this field so as to exert the best publicizing and communicating effects of ICH information.