On Translation Of Tourism Materials Under The Theory Of Functional Equivalence

This report mainly focuses on the tourism materials that I have translated during my Master’s Degree. The Chinese translation of the English tourism materials is a tool for travel agents to expand the Chinese market. As a result, we are supposed to translate under market-oriented rule to meet the demands of the Chinese readers’interests to their maximum, in order to make sure that the Chinese translation is capable of attracting its potential customers, arousing their interest in the tourist products or services and inspiring their purchasing needs.The difficulties in the process of translation are caused by the lack of theoretical guidance and the vast language differences. Without theoretical guidance the earlier translation could not meet the demands of the readers. And due to the major changes in living environments; values, social customs, habits, history and even religions, English and Chinese are two completely different languages with great variety in expressions, in thinking patterns or logical differences, and in those particular cultural terms that we often failed to find the corresponding equivalence in the target language.To solve the problems the report makes an attempt to rely on Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory as the theorical guidance. Functional Equivalence stresses on the readers’ response. So it matches the final goal of tourism promotion material, which is being Market-Oriented. The report makes a comparison between the translations with or without the guide of Functional Equivalence. But it is quite important to ensure that we should be faithful to the English tourism materials, we cannot over-emphasize the market attraction of the translation.A sample of the translation and a sample of the corpus of cultural terms and specialized high-frequency tourism words in the appendix will provide a glimpse of the depth and range of our work.