A Study Of Chinese-English Tourism Translation From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

In recent years, the booming of China tourist industry has vitnessed an increasing demand for high quality tourism translation in large quantities, but the translation seems rather problematic in reality. Low quality tourist texts may cause misunderstanding and confusion, even offend international tourists. It therefore needs improvement based on scientific guidelines.Skopos theory came into being in the 1970s. It is the best developed theory in German Functionalism. Since it is function-oriented and pays attention to target readers'acception, Skopos theory, compared with other traditional translation theories, is more feasible for the translation of applied texts. However, Skopos theory just provides translators with a new perspective, the specific translation techniques are determined by translators themselves. Current tourism translation mostly lacks a guiding theory, and the translation process mainly depends on translators'experience. In order to change this situation, the author attempts to combine Skopos theory with tourism translation in this thesis and tries to put forward suggestions for practical use.The author firstly does a literature review on tourism translation, including definition of tourism and related terms, and the present research situation of tourism translation. Compared with other traditional translation theories, German Functionalism, especially Skopos theory provides useful guidance to tourism translation. The thesis then theoretically explores the early traces and basic views of Skopos theory. In the light of Skopos theory, the author finds out principles of Chinese-English tourism translation. Since translation is an inter-culture and inter-lingual activity, the author analyses features of Chinese and English tourism translation respectively. In the following chapters, the thesis goes deeper from theoretical exploration to translation practice. On the basis of analysis of Chinese and English tourism translation, the author sums up six tourism translation techniques: amplification and omission, reconstruction and adaptation, analogy and paraphrase to handle various translation problems. Finally, the author does case studies of some Jiangxi tourism translation. The author analyses many pieces of tourist texts collected directly from Jiangxi tourist destinations (most are taken from Mt Jinggang and Ruijing Red Revolutionary sites), does translation criticism, and gives suggested improvement of some translation.In the light of Skopos theory and based on analysis of many examples, it is concluded in the thesis that Skopos theory is appropriate for tourist text translation, and translation techniques put forward in accordance to Skopos theory are of high applicability. Therefore, Skopos theory is not only reasonable in theory, but also applicable to tourism translation in practice.