Translation Of Museum Commentaries For Audio Guides

With the development of cultural exchange between China and the West, more and more people from other countries come to visit China to learn more about Chinese culture and history. Storing large numbers of exhibits of scientific, artistic, cultural, or historical importance, museums are a major window for foreign visitors to see and learn about the unique culture of the country they visit. At present, many Chinese museums provide English translations of their Chinese commentaries to meet the needs of foreign tourists. However, many are far from satisfaction. This situation has aroused some scholars’attention at home, but most of them concentrate their efforts on the translation of the written versions, while translation of commentaries for audio guides, which is another important way of transferring information and disseminating culture, is scarcely studied. It’s necessary to carry out a comprehensive study on commentaries for audio guides not only because of the tourist’s high demand but also for its own features and advantages.Categorized into tourism translation, museum commentaries translation is also a part of pragmatic translation. Generally speaking, the criterion of pragmatic translation should be based on the source text with achieving the intended function or purpose of the target text as the criterion. In this point, the Skopos Theory, advanced by Reiss, Vermeer, Nord and other German functionalists, can be served as the guide of museum commentaries translation.On the basis of Skopos Theory and previous studies of museum commentary translation, this paper takes Shaanxi History Museum, one of the leading museums in China, for case study. Different translation strategies in accordance with different types of commentary texts are explored through comparing the Chinese commentaries of Shaanxi History Museum with their English versions for the target audience’s sake, as well as a fact-finding research in the museum by interviewing foreign tourists, and analyzing differences between Chinese and Western cultures and reasons behind.Meanwhile, this paper tries to suggest some solutions to problems existing in the commentaries in Shaanxi History Museum so that information and culture can be disseminated better. The analysis shows that some translation strategies are especially effective and valuable for translation of museum commentaries for audio guides, such as amplification, omission, combination, division and reconstruction.