English Translation Of Zhangjiajie’s Scenic Spot Introduction:a Perspective Of Reader’s Horizon Of Expectation

English translation of Zhangjiajie’s scenic spot introduction plays a vital part in attracting the overseas tourists’interests, introducing the natural landscape and publicizing the local customs of the tourist resort. The thesis focuses all the attention on applying the reader’s horizon of expectation, an important concept of reception aesthetics, to the exploration of English translation of Zhangjiajie’s scenic spot introduction as well as the existing linguistic and cultural problems in it, so as to work out the appropriate strategies of tourism translation.With the rapid growth of tourism industry, the study of its translation is increasingly attracting more attention of translation scholars. However, most of the previous studies discuss this translational activity by the functionalist approach and cross-culture approach, few of them take the perspective of reception aesthetics, a reader-oriented theory. The functions of Zhangjiajie’s scenic spot introduction lie mainly in sending messages and then attracting readers, which belongs to the reader-oriented informative and vocative text types. Therefore reception aesthetics presents a good theoretical basis for the translation of scenic spot introduction.Reception aesthetics redefines the role and status of readers and argues that readers play an important role in the choices of original texts and translation strategies.According to reception aesthetics, the readers have their own world view, cultural knowledge, social experience and aesthetic tendency, and their consciousness is not empty before they read a literary work or when they are reading a literary work, which constitutes the readers’horizon of expectation. The reader is not a passive receiver but an active participant in interpretation. The translator should take the reader’s horizon of expectation into adequate consideration in the process of translation, whose work functions either by meeting those expectations or by challenging them. If the work meets reader’s directed expectation, fusion of horizons could be achieved soon; if the work beyond reader’s horizon of expectation, fusion of horizons could only be fulfilled until the reader’s previous horizon of expectation is changed into reader’s creative expectation. Due to the different horizon of expectation, cultural traditions, life experience, ideology, the target text readers will influence translator’s choice of translation strategies. Accordingly, the translation of scenic spot introduction should not always be measured by the traditional equivalence-based translation standard of complete translation which always seeks for total fidelity to the original text. In order to fulfill reader’s directed expectation and offer more acceptable information, translation strategies such as omission, rewriting and analogy could be adopted. In order to fulfill reader’s creative expectation and offer more cultural information, translator could take the strategies of addition, annotation and transliteration plus note. Simply speaking, translator could apply subtraction to meet reader’s directed expectation and addition to meet reader’s creative expectation.