On C-E Translation Of Red Tourism Interpretive Texts From Functionalist Approaches

As an emerging type of tourism with Chinese characteristics, red tourism has attracted tens of millions of tourists from home and abroad each year over the past decade. However, red tourism translation, an important channel for overseas tourists to learn about the Chinese revolutionary culture, was rarely studied. Moreover, of the limited studies, little work was done to classify the translation errors and few translation methods were proposed. The paper hereby attempts to study the C-E translation of red tourism interpretive texts from functionalist approaches, trying to classify the translation errors and proposing the translation methods. The author selects Wangjiaping Revolutionary Memorial Hall, Zaoyuan Revolutionary Site and Yangjialing Revolutionary Site in Yan’an city as the data sources to conduct the research. The research is qualitative in nature and methodologies such as literature analysis, field research and qualitative analysis are employed. The author finds that three categories of translation errors can be identified: pragmatic translation errors, cultural translation errors and linguistic translation errors. Pragmatic translation errors involve improper information selection and target-language convention violation. Cultural translation errors cover problems with culture-specific phenomena, conflicts over outlooks on the world and values, and conflicts over ideologies. Linguistic translation errors include spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes, punctuation mistakes, inappropriate uppercase and lowercase, inconsistent terminologies and Chinglish. On the basis of the error analysis, the author proposes corresponding translation methods for red tourism interpretive texts, including literal translation, free translation, imitation and rewriting.