On Mistranslating Mount Tai Tourism Texts

The translation of tourist texts is an important factor to attract foreign tourists, and the translation quality will directly affect the foreign tourists’ understanding of scenic spots. As there are many differences exist in the aspects of culture, language habit and expression between China and western countries, the mistranslation will unavoidably appear in the translation of the tourist text. In recent years, despite of the ever-improving quality of the translation, the limitations still exist. So how to improve the translation quality of tourist text becomes a research topic with practical significance.In order to study the translation problems existing in the tourist text, the author went to Mount Tai and collected a lot of first-hand materials. After comparing the examples of tourist text between Chinese and English, the author finds that the two kinds of tourist text both have there own characteristics. The Chinese tourist text tends to adopt abstract and flowery language, and often contains lots of historical stories and folk tales, while the English tourist text emphasizes on logic, and prefers to use compact and concise vocabularies. These distinctions provide reference for revising of the mistranslation.After analysing the translation of Mount Tai tourist texts, the author discovers many translation errors. Christiane Nord (2001) once classified the translation problems and errors into four aspects, that is, linguistic errors, pragmatic errors, cultural errors and text-special errors. With reference to his classification, the author classifies the usual translation problems and errors of Mount Tai into five categories:lexical errors, grammatical errors, pragmatic errors, stylistic errors and cultural errors.This thesis tries to revise the translation errors in the Mount Tai tourist text. In order to avoid the translation errors, certain translation principles and strategies should be followed so as to enhance the translation quality of tourism text. The thesis argues for tourists-centered principle and culture-orientation principle to guarantee the acceptability of the English version. In accordance with the tourists-centered principle and culture-orientation principle, appropriate translation strategies such as translation couplet, paraphrase, amplification, omission, remolding and rewriting should be put into use in translating. These strategies can be appropriately applied not only to the translation of Mount Tai tourism texts, but also appropriate to the translation of other tourism texts. Meanwhile, the integrated use of these strategies can make the translation suit the taste of foreign tourists as well as improve its own quality.From the errors found in Mount Tai tourism text, two more implications can be drawn. First, for the translators, in addition to attending the related training, it’s also significant for them to be skilled at both Chinese and English, and have a strong sense of responsibility. Additionally, it’s important for translators to have a certain amount of knowledge or sometimes even the professional knowledge about the scenic spots, which is a must for them to be qualified translators. Second, for authorities, the author suggests that enough importance should be attached to the management and supervision of the translation process, and also to the capitalization problems in the translation of the tourism texts, especially for the translation of the scenic spots’names, the authorities are suggested to standardise the use of lowercase letters and uppercase letters, and replace the introduction boards which contain obvious translation errors if necessary.The author hopes that the proposed translation principles and strategies of tourism text can be used in the future translation, so as to enhance the translation quality and promote the development of China’s tourism industry...