English Translation Of Tourist Texts From Functionalist Approaches

With a fairly long history of civilization and resplendent culture, modern China has plenty of well-known historical sites, spectacular scenic spots, colorful national customs, and potential tourist resources, which attract more and more overseas tourists. The booming of tourism industry creates the need for well-translated tourist texts to provide qualified information for foreign tourists to travel to the destinations in China. However, the quality of current English versions of Chinese tourist texts is far from satisfactory. Therefore, tourist text translation has become an urgent issue which deserves an in-depth study to call for the translators' attention and solution.The thesis introduces the functionalist approach theory, Skopos theory, Newmark's text typology theory, and Nida's Dynamic Equivalence theory, analyzes the characteristics, classifications as well as the functions of tourist texts, studies cultural problems in tourist text translation, and explores the features and requirements and criteria of tourist text translation. This thesis makes a tentative study on tourist text translation based on functionalist approaches, and prescribes what strategies and methods should be adopted in the translating of Chinese tourist texts with examples illustrated.