A Study On English Translation Of Chinese Tour Guide Commentary From The Perspective Of Palmer's Discourse Scenarios

The tour guide commentary (here after TGC) is the language used by tour guides when they are describing, explaining the scenic spots, spreading the culture, and communicating with the tourists. With the development of the communication between China and the foreign countries, TGC translation becomes more and more important. Tour guide should express the TGC well with their own cross-cultural knowledge and pragmatics, according the certain requirements in certain communication situation. As the tool of communication between the tour guides and foreign tourists, whether the tourists can have a deep understanding about the environment of the scenic spot and experience the local customs and cultures depends on the quality of TGC translation. However, currently, there is no unique standard for the English translation of TGC, the Dalian TGC and its translation chosen in this paper comes from the introduction in the scenic spots, the Tourism Administration's official website and publications, the characteristics, strategies, as well as the effects of the translation worth studying.TGC usually exists in the form of discourse, so it is necessary to base the study on some theory relevant to the discourse. Palmer's discourse scenarios combine the cultural linguistics, which features humanism, cognition and imagery, with the discourse study; and apply the image and schema into discourse analysis. The cognitive images projected into human's communication outline the discourse framework,in turn the discourse scenarios come into being. The discourse scenario established in Palmer's cultural linguistics is a kind of conversational cognitive model that entails human participants and interaction, including: participation schema, speech acts schema, sequencing schema, perspective schema, and ideational schema.TGC is various in types and wide in range, so this paper chooses the typical tourist city of Dalian with numerous foreign tourists, in order to make the study more specific and concentrated, and analyzes a series of problems involved in the English translation of TGC from the perspective of discourse scenarios, including: language system, social culture, communication function, as well as aesthetic. The study shows that as a kind of analyzing mode, the discourse scenario has explanatory power in analyzing the English translation of TGC.In short, based on the theory of the Palmer's discourse scenarios, this thesis discusses the explanatory power of discourse scenarios and translation strategies for the tour guide commentary by categorizing and analyzing the existing problems in English translation of the Dalian TGC.