A Study On The Adaptation Theory Applied In Chinese-English Tourism Text Translation

Translation not only involves language transforming, but also contains culture conveying, and thus it serves as a bridge between different languages rooted in different cultures. Tourism text translation is just a case in point. In order to produce a good tourism text translation from Chinese into English, importance should be attached, first of all, to different features of the source text and target text in writing style. By doing so, a translator could follow the linguistic and socio-cultural norms of the target language.Owing to the significant role that tourist industry plays in economic development, almost all parts of China which are rich in tourist resources have identified tourism as one of the key sectors to speed up regional development. With a unique and fascinating historical and cultural background and tourist resources as well, Inner Mongolia has attracted a large number of tourists and will appeal to more and more travelers from home and abroad. Under such circumstances, quality tourism text translation which would exactly help introduce local conditions and social customs has become an urgent task. On the other hand, poor translated texts about Inner Mongolia would have negative effects on its tourism. This thesis also analyzes existing problems in the translation of tourism texts about Inner Mongolia. For the sake of solving these problems, and from the perspective of the Adaptation Theory advanced by Verschuerent, this thesis makes a tentative study on Chinese-English (C-E) tourism text translation, and then puts forward some translation strategies for translating C-E tourism texts about Inner Mongolia.According to the Adaptation Theory, (1) language has three properties: variability, negotiability, and adaptability, which could make successful conversion of source language into target language possible; (2) in translation practice, a translator should make pragmatic investigation from four angles, that is, contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, and the dynamics of adaptability and the salience of adaptation process. The translation of tourism texts is a dynamic process of making adaptation between linguistic structure and context at various levels of salience. The thesis investigates the translation principles of tourism texts from the three perspectives: the linguistic structure, the target readers' mental word and social world.Considering the fact that, by now, there have been few studies on the tourism text translation from Adaptation Theory perspective, and that there have been no published authoritative English versions on tourism texts about Inner Mongolia, under the guidance of Adaptation Theory, The thesis author attempts to probe into effective ways to improve the C-E translation quality of Inner Mongolia tourism texts through some case studies.