A Study On C-E Translation Of Four-Character Expressions In Tourist Texts

Known as one of the birthplaces of Chinese civilization, Shanxi Province prides itself on its long history and rich culture. With almost 70% traditional architectures of China and abundant tourist resources, Shanxi Province was crowned as China’s traditional art museum. However, how to translate tourist texts effectively and accurately, esp. the four-character expressions, is a challenge for many translators and interpreters. Based on the translation of the book Introduction to Tourist Attractions in Shanxi Province, this thesis takes functionalist translation theory as the theoretical scaffolding to study the translation of four-character expressions in order to make the rendered version more readable and acceptable for target readers.The thesis comprises of four parts, i.e. Task Description, Translation Process, Case Study and Summary. In Task Description, task background and aims are introduced, as well as the theoretical foundation of the whole thesis. In Translation Process, the thesis presents three parts of activities, which are pre-translation preparation, translation procedure and post-translation proofreading. In Case Study, based on the analysis of linguistic features of Chinese and English tourist texts, the thesis focuses on the features of four-character expressions and proposes three different adaptive translation methods, i.e. direct translation, omission and reorganization. The thesis highlights the characteristic of English tourist texts:the language is usually logic, simple, and concise, and the informative function is preferred, so reorganization is more often used in the translation of four-character expressions.