A Study On Zero Translation Of Tourist Attraction:from The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Tourism industry is an important window to the international communication. It could not only transmit our long historical culture, but also make great development of economy. After the opening and reforming policy, the tourism industry has got great improvement. Zero translation of tourist attraction, covering a wide range of elements such as nature, geography, architecture, culture and so on, is not only a transformation between the two languages, but also a kind of cross-cultural communication, the quality of which concerns China’s international image as well as the promotion of China’s cultural exchange with western countries. But the existing translations still have a lot of problems.they could not meet the tourists needs. Most of the translations, customs as well as expressions, following the Chinese logical ways not the foreign tourists real needs, can not convey the valid information and lead to the failure communication. Because of the importance the translations to the tourism industry, the study should be comprehensive and systematic.This thesis make the research on the zero translation of tourist attraction, zero translation defines as "translating words in the SL without using the already existing words in the TL", and the mainly translate methods are ellipsis transliteration, complementary translation, literal translation with notes and so on. These kinds of methods are often used in translation, but never systematically studied from the perspective of zero translation. Data are collected by the corpus linguistics and analyze from the usage of the tourist translations. The thesis makes the summary of the classification and research significance of zero translation.The thesis makes a depth analysis of the zero translation of tourist attraction from the perspective of adaptation theory, aiming to convey the cultural information of tourist attractions and make full efforts of transmitting the language and culture information. Because language is of the properties of variability, negotiability and adaptability, the translators should make dynamic choices when translating according to the language structure of different context and nations. In the concrete translation practices, tourist texts of Chinese and English have their unique language customs and expression ways, which is the main reason why we should make the dynamic choices. From the perspective of linguistics, the most differences are that Chinese is a parataxis language while English hypotaxis. Verschueren believes that mental world contains emotional elements and the inner cognitions of personalities, emotions, religious, ambitions, motivations and purposes. Only if we bring the linguistic, social, cultural and psychological factors into a coherent and integral framework, can we overcome the obstacles of culture and language and convey the most information of tourist attractions. The present study tries to find a new angle for the zero translation of tourist texts and to enhance the acceptability of the translated versions.The thesis is made up of six chapters. Chapter one is a brief introduction to the significance, rationale, data collection and research method of the thesis. Chapter Two provides a literature review of the previous research at home and abroad tourist attraction translation and a general survey on the zero translation. Chapter three deals with the theoretical framework of this thesis, introducing some key notions of adaptation theory such as choice making in language use, three properties of language and four angles of investigation, and then pointing out that these aspects are inter-dependent in the formation of adaptation theory. Chapter four is data collecting and analysis of zero translation. Chapter Five makes a detailed analysis of the collected examples, mainly focusing on four sections:contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics of adaptability, salience of adaptability. Chapter Six is the conclusion of the thesis, including major findings, some limitations and implications for further research.