On Simplification And Amplification For Re-translating "Potala Palace" And "Shaolin Temple" In A Cross-Cultural Way

From a humanistic point of view, tourism is a cultural activity and a typical example of inter-cultural communication. However, this way of communication tends to malfunction due to a lack of cross-cultural consciousness and professionalism that are a must for tour narration or tour guide speech translation. Through academic analyses of the English translation of two articles in《走遍中国——中国导游词精选(综合篇)》—Touring China:Selected Tour Commentaries (Volume1), the Author of the thesis reaffirms the importance of tourist-oriented translation methods or approaches. Accordingly, the Author provides his own target texts improved by several translation guidelines concerning the use of amplification and simplification techniques. Specifically, both strategies are adopted to render names and titles, culturally-loaded terms, couplets, poems and lyrics, as well as descriptive and narrative paragraphs. With regard to tour narrations, the Author proposes that simplification be widely adopted in the translation of contextually less important proper names and descriptive texts, and that amplification should play a dominant role in rendering most cultural-specific items. As for narrative paragraphs, a large amount of simplification and rewriting should be involved.