A Contrastive Study Of English Tourism Texts On Chinese And British Websites:a Functional Approach

According to World Tourism Organization, China will be the world’s largest tourist destination by the year2020. As the rapid development of Internet, Chinese tourism industry pays increasing attention to the construction of English tourism websites, in which English Tourism Texts (ETT) is an important means to publicize and promote tourism products and services. As a special genre, ETT has attracted great attention of Chinese linguists and scholars who focus on the study of ETT from the perspectives of genre analysis, translation as well as the contrastive study between Chinese and English, but rarely on contrastive analysis between the ETT on Chinese tourism websites and English speaking countries’tourism websites.The present study makes a contrastive analysis of ETT on Chinese websites (ETT-C) and ETT on British websites (ETT-B), following the theory of metafunction in Functional Grammar and based on a corpus of50pieces of ETT-C and50pieces of ETT-B. Through the analysis and discussion, we find that from the perspective of ideational function, by the contrastive analysis of transitivity, it is found that material and relational processes account for the overwhelming majority, but material process ranks first in ETT-B and relational process ranks first in ETT-C, which may indicate that ETT-C emphasize static description but ETT-B pay more attention to dynamic narration. Furthermore, ETT-C have no behavioural process, by contrast, six types of processes are all used in ETT-B so as to make the language more versatile. As to the interpersonal function, the contrastive analysis of speech function shows that the majority of clauses choose declarative mood in both ETT-C and ETT-B so as to give vivid description of scenic spot and provide rich tourism information for the tourists. Interrogative and imperative moods are absent in ETT-C but are popular in ETT-B which can enrich the linguistic form and enhance the interactivity. In terms of person pronoun, the third person pronoun is favored by both ETT-C and ETT-B. But compared with ETT-C, ETT-B use more first and second person pronouns to shorten the distance and establish interaction between the writers and readers. As far as modality is concerned, low value modal operators are employed to show the politeness and negotiability. But the frequency of model operators of low and median value in ETT-B is higher than ETT-C. From the perspective of textual function, simple theme is predominant in both ETT-C and ETT-B so as to make the text concise and easy to understand. But multiple theme occurs more in ETT-B than in ETT-C. In addition, unmarked theme predominates in both ETT-C and ETT-B. And many of the marked themes consist of the temporal and locative adjuncts so as to enhance the foregrounding of the tourist attractions.This study, to some extent, reveals the similarities and differences between ETT-C and ETT-B from the perspective of metafunction. It is hoped that the results could help the copywriters of ETT-C to take the linguistic features of English as well as the culture into consideration when composing ETT, so as to help the texts achieve the communicative goal successfully and meanwhile help the Chinese tourism websites promote the business more effectively. It is also hoped that this thesis could contribute to the practice of English teaching and the studies of ETT translation.