A Study On The Translation Methods Of Tourism Text Based On Skopos Theory

With a profound historical culture and colorful natural landscape, China has attracted a large number of foreign tourists. With the deepening of China’s reform and opening-up policy, more and more foreigners take China as the best choice for traveling, and the China’s tourist industry is booming. In recent years, as the Chinese government strives to develop tourism into a strategic pillar industry of the nation’s economy and accelerates the transformation of the development mode and opens wider to the outside world and strengthen the "soft’*and " hard" environment of the tourist industry, the whole quality and level of service of the tourism will be enhanced. While the translation of tourist text from Chinese to English(C-E) acts as a tool for communicating information, promoting culture and creating "soft" environment, it has attract more and more attention from the experts and scholars. The quality of the translation of the tourist text will affect the acceptance of the tourism resources to a great extent and furthermore will impact the whole development of the tourism, so how to improve the quality of the translation of the tourist text has current and practical significance.The thesis studies the C-E translation of tourism text in Yichang from the perspective of Skopos theory. According to the theory, everything has a purpose and translation is also governed by a purpose. It is the intended purpose that justifies the translation process and methods. The tourist text is typical informative and manipulation text tourist text translation, so the tourism translation aims at providing relevant information for foreign tourists and attracting them to pay a visit to China. Based on the purpose and through analysis of abundant examples, the author argues that tourist text translation is supposed to achieve the appellative function and the communicative purpose rather than simply pursue literal equivalence or equal transmission of information. In the process of translation, the translator should take the functional features of tourist text along with its translation purposes into consideration, and adopt flexible methods in translation instead of rigidly adhere to the original text. The conclusion draw in the thesis is that (1) Skopos theory provides a new perspective to the study of tourism translation and it can serves as a guiding principle for the C-E translation of tourism text.(2) Under the guidance of Skopos theory, the translators should obey three rules in tourism translation, namely the skopos rule, the coherence rule and the function plus loyalty rule. Among them, skopos rule is the fundamental rule and coherence rule and fidelity rule are subordinate to the Skopos rule.(3) Based on the Skopos theory, the author suggested two criteria and five kinds of concrete methods applicable to the tourism translation. Two criteria are the target text function oriented and the target tourists oriented. And the concrete method includes literary translation, transliteration plus addition, deletion, adaptation and reorganization. The four kinds of translation methods are used in a comprehensive manner instead of a separate way so as to achieve the intended purpose of the target translation.