English Translation Of Hunan Tourism Text: Error Analysis And Exploration To Translation Methods

China, rich in cultural and natural tourist destinations, would welcome more and more foreign tourists each year. In the context of the prosperity of tourism, the development of tourism in Hunan province has entered a peak period. Owing to the differences in culture and language background, the conflict between Chinese tradition and foreign tourists appears. How to attract foreign tourists and how to promote Hunan tourism text and introduce local culture, all of which has a direct bearing on the further development of Hunan tourism text translation. However, according to some data that the author collected, translation errors and problems exist in Hunan tourism text translation, which exist at a linguistic, pragmatic or cultural level. Therefore, the thesis attempts to analyze errors of English translation of Hunan tourism text and explore to its translation methods under the guidance of the German functionalist translation theory.Numerous scholars have done many valuable studies into English translation of Hunan tourism text from different perspectives. Their studies are of specific instructions to English translation of Hunan tourism text. However, their studies leave the functions, the purpose and participants of the translation out of consideration. As a kind of practical writing, the uniform evaluation standard of tourism text is in target language and target reader orientation according to functionalist translation theory. So the feasibility of the application of the functionalist approach has been testified. The functionalist translation theory emphasizes communicative functions, Skopostheorie and translational action. The thesis makes German functionalist translation theory the guiding rules of translation, takes Hunan tourism text for example and studies them from the above three principles, by which English translation of Hunan tourism text is characterized. We should avoid some mistakes at linguistic, pragmatic and cultural level, then the quality of Hunan tourism text translation can be improved.According to Nord's major division of translation errors and problems: linguistic, pragmatic and cultural problems. The body of this thesis consists of three parts to study the translation errors and problems in tourism text. Chapter One discusses communicative functions to explore various translation mistakes at linguistic level which includes graphological, grammatical, semantic and rhetoric perspective, etc. Then this chapter comes up with some linguistic translation methods, such as literal translation and omission to avoid linguistic mistakes. Chapter Two discusses Skopostheorie to explore various translation mistakes at pragmatic level which includes unidiomatic cultural terms, unidiomatic proper names and chinglish, and put forward some pragmatic translation methods, such as transliteration plus explanation, paraphrase and amplification, etc. Chapter Three discusses translational action to generalize various translation mistakes at cultural level which includes misunderstanding of source language, culture verbose and pompous diction and coverall contents and formal style, and proposes to adopt some cultural translation methods to convey the cultural significance of tourism text, such as addition, restructuring and analogy. From the above analysis, we can know that translators are mainly influenced by source readers'cultural background, thinking modes and the source language structure, which make target text unacceptable to target readers. All in all, the mistakes belong to the translators'inability to comprehend the linguistic, pragmatic and cultural problems, so some proper translation methods should be recommended. Through the error analysis of English translation of Chinese tourism text and exploration to translation methods, the thesis attempts to improve the tourism translation and make the Hunan tourism text become globally shared resources and also hope that the study will be of help for the translation practice.