A Descriptive Translation Study Of Interpretive Signs In Scenic Spots From The Perspective Of Functional Stylistics

Interpretive signs are an important part of the interpretive system in tourist spots. The interpretive sign texts, as a specific kind of tourism texts, contain important natural, historical and geographical knowledge and information about the tourist attractions to help visitors gain a better and thorough travel experience. Existing researches on the translation of interpretive sign texts are dominated by prescriptive studies, and few have touched on the analysis of their stylistic features. Therefore, this research tries to conduct functional stylistic analysis on three sets of interpretive sign texts –(1) English interpretive sign texts collected from English-speaking countries,(2) Chinese interpretive sign texts in the original language together with(3) their translated texts, and study the translation norms based on the comparative stylistic analysis so as to obtain a better understanding about the status quo of C-E translation of interpretive sign texts, and enrich current tourism translation studies dominated by prescriptive studies.This research adopts functional stylistics as its theoretic foundation and conducts a quantitative analysis on a series of features such as text length, transitivity process and mood system at the graphology level and the lexical-grammatical level. The statistical results then combined with contextual analysis are compared to identify the stylistic features of the three sets of interpretive sign texts, based on which the norms governing the C-E translation of interpretive sign texts are generalized for further verification.The study results suggest that stylistic disparities exist between Chinese interpretive sign texts and the parallel English texts in terms of transitivity process, mood system and graphology features; in translating interpretive sign texts from Chinese to English, the original graphology features are preserved in the target texts, the selection of transitivity structures will be ST-oriented, while the selection of mood system will be TT-oriented; omission and shift to hypernym are two most common translation techniques used by translators to deal with the dilemma between the demand of information integrity and the restriction posed by limited space on interpretive signs and relatively short time reserved for reading the signs.