C-E Translation Of Tourist Texts-A "Kan, Yi, Xie" Approach

As an important branch of hospitality industry, tourism relies heavily on the promotion or marketing of tourist destinations and related services and facilities. It can be divided into internal tourist publicity and external tourist publicity by the different target readers it carters to. Both serve the function of promoting tourist destinations, but the latter is oriented to overseas tourists, and therefore needs a shift of language and correspondingly a shift of the writing style of tourist texts from Chinese to English. And all these transformations and the consequent adaptations of source texts caused by them need to be accomplished by translation without changing the ultimate goal of tourism promotion. So the quality of tourism translation directly determines the effectiveness of tourism promotion, and thus the success of international tourism.However, so far the quality of the English version of Chinese tourist texts is still far from being satisfactory, which is mainly due to the fact that translators do not distinguish internal and external tourist publicity and strictly follow the Chinese texts'style and writing conventions. As a result, the translation turns out to be inconsistent with English readers'expectation and performs poorly in terms of promotion. The paper first makes a review of previous studies on tourism translation and finds that Functionalist Theories, and Skopos Theory in particular, do provide a theoretical framework for tourism translation, but it didn't point out how exactly translators should do to ensure the translation meet the expectations of target readers.The"Kan, Yi, Xie"translation approach for pragmatic translation offers an answer to this question. It argues that just like legal translation, medical translation, as well as business translation, tourism translation belongs to pragmatic translation and should follow the three steps of"Kan, Yi, Xie"or"Read, Adapt, Write". That is firstly to get familiarized with the linguistic features and writing conventions of English tourist texts, then translate or more exactly adapt the Chinese texts in accordance with these features and conventions, and after many such practice, one even can write out the English version directly based on the contents of Chinese texts. Following the above three steps together with case studies, this thesis set out to demonstrate how to translate Chinese tourist texts into English.The"Kan, Yi, Xie"translation approach emphasizes that the English translation of Chinese tourist texts should resemble their English counterparts as much as possible in terms of vocabulary, sentence patterns, textual structure, and styles, and thus overcome the long-existing drawbacks of translators'subjective choices, ensuring that the translation meets English readers'expectation and fulfils its ultimate goal of promotion and advertising.