An Analysis Of English Hotel Brochures And Chinese-English Translation

The foreign-related hotel, as the travelers' family, is a window of a country or a district as well as a place and a bond for international exchanges, wherein, hotel brochures are not only important means to expand business and attract customers, but also related to the image of the whole country and national culture of the reception side. Therefore, the quality of foreign-related translation of the hotel brochures will indirectly influence the cultural exchanges between China and other countries in the world.The translation of hotel brochures is categorized into the practical translation, which not only aims at information transmission but also focuses on the effect of information transmission. With prominent functionality and utilitarianism, western functionalist translation theory provides an effective way and breakthrough for practical translation. This theory emphasizes the functionality of the translation and the target text in the target culture. It declares that the translation is a purposeful act, maintaining a certain relationship between the target text and the source text by means of the translation purposes so as to smooth exchanges across cultural barriers. This thesis explores the translation of hotel brochures from the perspective of functionalist translation theory.Through authentic examples, the author points out that the translation of hotel brochures, instead of transferring the Chinese version into corresponding foreign words in a word-for-word manner, should reveal cultural connotation behind the language. However, a large number of problems appear in currently translated hotel brochures owing to various factors, which has brought about serious negative impact on China's hotel industry and left poor impressions of China and its long-cherished culture on the rest of the world. This thesis is to summarize problems in translating hotel brochures and supply suggestions on how to improve the translation standard.According to the hotel brochures that the author has collected, there are three major problems: Firstly, most of the English versions are the word-by-word translation of the Chinese ones; secondly, the language is cumbersome; and thirdly, the functional information is not prominent enough and the cultural information is overloaded; Besides, a lot of misuse of words and grammatical mistakes also exist This is mainly because that the translators are not familiar with the characteristics of the Chinese-English texts and they lack the necessary information about the receivers' demands and expectations as well as the knowledge of the cultural psychology of information receptors. The author holds that the hotel brochures translation should be attached great significance because of the potential social effect of scale. Therefore, this thesis attempts to explore translation methods of hotel brochures from the perspective of functional approach. According to Skopos theory, the author analyzes the functional characteristics of hotel brochures, makes a comparison between Chinese and Western hotel brochures from the perspectives of style and culture, and analyzes the linguistic errors, cultural errors and functional errors contained in the Chinese-English versions. To achieve the intended purpose of the target text, the author suggests the translation should not only be confined to the forms and contents of the source text, but should employ a variety of translation methods flexibly. This thesis adopts some specific translation strategies including addition, deletion, literal translation plus explication and adaptation.