An Analysis Of Cultural Transmission In Tourism Translation From The Perspective Of Reception Aesthetics

Beijing, China’s capital, has become a cosmopolitan city thanks to its long history, brilliant culture, and unique political and economic advantages. More and more westerners are attracted to Beijing with the increase of China’s international status. Motivated by the flourishing of Beijing tourism, the study of Beijing tourism translation is aimed to accurately convey the historical and cultural information of Beijing scenic spots by the carrier of target language so as to successfully attract western tourists, which has become the criterion for quality translation.Tourism texts involve a wide knowledge, covering a series of aspects, history, culture, geography, and customs and so on. However, Chinese and westerners are poles apart in social background, psychological perception, aesthetic habits and thinking models, for instance, Chinese emphasize “the union of heaven and man” while westerners “separation of subject and object”; Chinese appreciates flowery and elaborate words while westerners simplicity and conciseness. Thus, translators should adopt proper translation strategies to achieve transmission of cultural information. As a literary theory, Reception Aesthetics provides a brand-new perspective for tourism translation. The notions of “horizon of expectation”, “fusion of horizons” and “the role of readers” brought up by Reception Aesthetics theorists put emphasis on the aesthetic distance between the text and the reader as well as the reception of the reader. Therefore, in the process of translation, translators should take into account readers’ cultural background, aesthetic habits as well as the readers’ reception and flexibly adopt various translation strategies, such as explanation, amplification, omission and rewriting for the aim of successful cultural transmission.