Relevance-Theoretical Approach To English Translation Of Chinese Tourist Brochures

With the rapid development of China's inbound tourism, English translation of Chinese tourist brochures has been playing an essential role in publicizing China's tourism resources to the outside world. While a good translation of tourist brochures works well in informing foreigners of a particular scenic spot and thus appeals them to travel, a bad one regardless of linguistic and cultural context mismatches between the source language and the target language may lead to understanding difficulties or misinterpretations and consequently, may cast a negative image of the tourist destination. Generally speaking, the status quo of English translation of Chinese tourist brochures is not so satisfactory as evidenced by vast examples of spelling and grammatical mistakes, Chinglish and cultural misinterpretations. To improve the situation, a certain number of scholars began to attach importance to this issue and have done fruitful research in this field.By drawing insights from previous approaches, this thesis attempts to apply relevance theory to English translation of Chinese tourist brochures with the purpose to improve the quality of current tourism translation. Relevance theory is a new initiative which mainly concerns communication and cognition. According to relevance theory, communication not only requires encoding, transferring and decoding processes, but crucially involves inference in addition. Because of the inferential nature of human communication, the correct communicator-intended interpretation hinges on whether the correct context is used. Translation under relevance theory is regarded as a duel ostensive-inferential process in which the translator plays the role of both an inferential reader and an ostensive communicator. Under the guidance of relevance theory, the present study attempts to analyze essential issues involved in English translation of Chinese tourist brochures in terms of intentions, context and the cognitive process of the translator. Based on the analysis, the author proposes feasible strategies in accordance with the optimal relevance principle which emphasizes obtaining adequate contextual effects without gratuitous processing efforts. To illustrate those issues, the author has collected a lot of examples from tourist brochures, magazines and journals for theoretical argumentation. Due to the interlingual and cross-cultural nature of English translation of Chinese tourist brochures, this thesis adopts a contrastive methodology in the analysis and illustration of the guiding role of relevance theory.The findings of the present study proves that relevance-theoretical approach to English translation of Chinese tourist brochures can shed light on current theoretical research and practice in this field. On the one hand, this research proves the applicability of relevance theory to English translation of Chinese tourist brochures from the perspective of cognition and provides rich examples to support the theory. On the other hand, it will contribute to the improvement of English translation of Chinese tourist brochures as it provides a theoretical account and proposes feasible strategies for it.