On C-E Translation In Tourism Texts: A Perspective Of Vermeer's Skopos Theory

The booming international tourism industry in China has given rise to the need of well-translated tourist texts to provide quality traveling information for foreign tourists and attract more foreign people to travel to China. This has given Chinese-English (shorted as C-E) tourism translation a role of paramount importance. As a result, there have been continuous efforts to study tourism translation in general and C-E tourism translation in particular.So far, such studies have made remarkable progress toward the understanding of the process of C-E tourism translation, but are simultaneously limited in their philosophical guidelines, theoretical bases, methods and procedures, object and scope of study and other respects. The author thus lists some current existing problems in tourist text translation. Some typical translation problems are presented from different angles, mainly, cultural and linguistic. Since practice needs theories as its guideline, just as any theory must serve practice, Vermeer's Skopos Theory is introduced. Three major rules of Skopos Theory are used as the guiding principles to analyze and solve the problems in translation. It is proved theoretically and practically, that the theory will solve some problematic points which confuse us today and make better communications between China and other countries.According to the Skopos Theory, the top-ranking rule for any translation is the "Skopos rule", which says that a translation action is determined by its Skopos, this is "the end justifies the means". The author holds that three most outstanding purposes of the of Chinese tourist texts translation are, firstly providing necessary information for foreign tourists to facilitating their visit in China; secondly, arousing their interest and attracting more tourists to visit the country so as to help promote China's culture as well as tourist economy; finally, enhancing the mutual understanding between the Chinese people and other peoples in the world. Thus, all tourism text translation should serve these aims according to the specific situation.Based on Skopos Theory and the analysis of the existing problems, the author raised the respective practical translation methods. It can be mainly drawn from the research that three rules of Skopos Theory offer functional and target-oriented perspectives for Chinese-English translation of tourism text and can be applied to guide Chinese-English translation of tourism text. Furthermore, it may suggest that the Skopos rule is one of the most important criteria in judging the quality of Chinese-English translation of tourist texts.