On The C-E Translation Of Tour Guides’ Commentaries From The Perspective Of Domestication And Foreignization

Language is the carrier of culture, which is part of the culture as well as itsexpression. Regarding how to deal with ST and TT, cross culture difficulties andbetter deliver messages in translation, there are two translation strategies:domestication and foreignization. Domestication tends to be closer to the reader,requiring interpreters to adopt readers’ expressing habits and deliver messages in away that readers are easy to understand. However, foreignization tends to be closer tothe writer., requiring interpreters to adopt writers’ expressing methods to delivermessages. The choice of domestication and foreignization is the subject of argumentsin the translation field as well as the key point of this thesis. Although there are manyresearches on tourism translation, there are few on tour guide interpretation withoutsystematic works, not speaking of researches on tour guide interpretation from theperspective of domestication and foreignization. Former thesis related to tourismtranslation or tour guide interpretation is mostly about experience. For example,appealing to the tour guides to enhance their English level, stressing the importance ofcross-culture awareness, taking tourists as the starting point and culture transmissionas the keystone of translation and classifying the differences of western and easterncultures. However, it seems that no one has further discussed how to handle thecultural differences in tour guide interpretation and how to choose translationstrategies accordingly. This thesis tries to do some digging in this field. Due to thehuge cultural gap in western and eastern worlds, tour guide interpretation, as thecarrier of cultural communication, is full of distinctive Chinese culture characteristics,like words without cultural correspondents, four-character phrases, Chinese poems,and couplets etc. How to pass the cultural information to western tourists and makethem know about Chinese culture while not frustrating them with complicatedtranslation is significant in both theory and practice. This paper tends to combine thedomestication and foreignization in the translation of tour guide interpretation anddeliver information to western tourists efficiently. Since tour guide interpretation is anoral way and flies by like lightening, the author believes that domination should playa major role in translation considering the acceptability of tourists and translationeffects. Meanwhile, western tourists also want to learn Chinese culture and not justfor fun, the author suggests foreignization as the assistant translation strategy, in order to introduce distinctive culture characteristic on the premise that scenic informationhas be delivered clearly.