An Adaptation Theory Approach To C-e Tourist Translation

Nowadays tourism industry has become an important industry which boosts its economy in almost every country. Not only can it provides employment opportunities for thousands of people, but also promotes the exchanges economically and culturally between different countries and increase understanding and life quality. Tourism industry in China has also become an important part worldwide. As a country with long history, China has its uniqueness in history, culture and beautiful natural scenes which attracts many people at home and abroad. China has become one of the most popular tourist destinations. During 2008 Olympic Games period in August,1,910,000 people came to China. China will be the largest tourist destination in 10 years, based on official forecast. China will open up and welcome more international tourists and become more prosperous in the tourism market.However the development of translation on tourist publicity is relatively low. Linguistic, cultural and pragmatic mistakes in the tourist publicity hamper the cross-cultural communication and damage the image of the destination. Tourist materials translation, as one branch of pragmatic translation, is an emerging and promising field for translation study. Laying emphasis on the transmission of information and its publicity effect, tourist materials translation is ultimately evaluated by its acceptability among tourists. Therefore the translator should orient himself/herself to the target language or target readers by means of various strategies.The author proposes an adaptive translation model under the framework of Verschueren's Adaptation Theory in the hope for providing suggestions for the tourist publicity translation both in theory and practice. Verschueren's points out that structure and context constitute the contents of adaptability, in the main part of this thesis, the author explores the structural adaptation in tourist materials translation from the stylistic, sound, lexical and syntactic level. And mental world and social world of tourists in contextual correlates are also playing their roles for the translator's adaptation strategies. Finally, the author summarizes the process of tourist materials translation:tourist materials translation is a dynamic choice-making process involving certain degree of salience for the purpose of achieving adaptability in terms of structural and contextual correlates.