Optimal Relevance Of C-E Translation Of Tourist Texts

With the development of our society, tourism has become one of the largest scale industries with the strongest increasing tendency in the global economy. It is necessary for China to publicize its culture and tourist resources so as to attract more foreign tourists to visit China, and English versions of Chinese tourist texts play an important role in introducing China to the world. Therefore, the high-quality tourist text translation is in an urgent need, yet the translation quality is far from satisfaction and needs to be improved.Based on Relevance Theory, this thesis puts an emphasis on how to achieve optimal relevance in the process of C-E tourist text translation through qualitative analysis, contrastive analysis as well as cases study. In the framework of Relevance Theory, translation is a special form of inter-lingual communication, and the translation process is defined as a dual ostensive-inferential one, in which the translator plays the central role of understanding the original author’s intention, the cultural background and connotative meaning of the source text and the target reader’s cognitive environments and ability in order to achieve optimal relevance between the source and the target text. Under the guidance of optimal relevance, the fulfillment of optimal relevance in the target text is the criteria for successful translation. Therefore, the author of this thesis interprets how to achieve optimal relevance in the process of C-E tourist text translation with examples by analyzing two decisive factors for relevance:processing efforts and contextual effect. In addition, the author puts forward three translation strategies, domestication, foreignization and the integration of domestication and foreignization, in order to better achieve optimal relevance in C-E tourist text translation.The thesis attempts to probe into the research methods, translation criteria and translation strategies of tourist text translation so as to improve the quality of C-E tourist text translation in China.