An Investigative Analysis Of The English Sign Commentary In Qujiang In Terms Of Skopostheorie

More and more foreign tourists come to China for sightseeing these days. The sign commentaries of scenic spots are one of the most important and frequent propaganda windows to tourists. The quality of C-E versions of sign commentaries becomes particularly significant for tourists, especially the popular self-guided travelers today. Therefore, how to properly and accurately translate sign commentaries has become a hot issue which can not be ignored.This thesis, as its research object, takes the Qujiang Tourism Area, which is one of the famous and newly-built tourism zones in the city of Xi'an and consists of 4 resorts in which there are approximately 1200 English sign commentaries. From this area only 80 Chinese-English versions of sign commentaries are randomly collected as sample materials, which are middle-sized in length and plainer in sight because of restriction of the thesis.The sample materials were all analyzed in terms of Skopostheorie, this theory stating that any translation action is determined by its Skopos, that is, by its purpose, thus the "Skopos rule" as the top-rank rule for translation. According to this rule, a sign commentary will be translated with the purpose to provide the basic service information, which can help tourists understand the scenic spots more completely, obtain more tourism value, and bring more social, economical,and cultural benefits.The author collected 80 pieces of English sign commentaries, roughly diagnosed them, and gave case analyses to those typical versions. To evaluate the feedback and seek more sources, the questionnaire was designed and delivered, and an interview to the five foreign visitors was conducted. In the end the research shows more merits than errors for Chinese-English sign commentaries.But the error number and the bad impacts should not be neglected. Thus, the author analyzed in detail those problematic texts under the theoretical guidance and found that the translation errors are mainly linguistic, cultural, and pragmatic.The causes lie all in around the translator's factor, language transfer, cultural default, a lack of cross-cultural awareness, and so on. Then the author puts forward some methods for improving these problematic existing sign commentaries. Anyway, some of the research findings and discussions and correction methods are freshly and newly-found and have some practically new values because the research itself is uniquely and individually performed.To sum up, the author gives her commendations to the merits of the Chinese-English sign versions in order to make fuller play of them. At the same time, the author hopes that the revising methods and approaches she offered will present some help to the translation of tourism sign commentaries in Xi'an or in other areas. And it is still the author's hope that, for the future researches, she will correct those defects left from this study and will be very glad to hear feedback opinions by others.