A Report On Tourism-Text Translation From The Functionalist Perspective

With tourism booming worldwide, the number of inbound and outbound tourists in China has been increasing greatly in recent years. In 2015, the National Tourism Administration Information Center pointed out that, in the year of 2014, the number of Chinese outbound tourists surpassed that of Germany and the United States, becoming the world’s largest outbound market. Meanwhile, the World Tourism Organization predicts that, by 2020, China will surpass other countries to become the world’s largest tourist destination country. In face of such a huge group of inbound and outbound tourism, it is of great significance for us to do well in tourism translation so as to provide detailed and accurate information of travel for domestic and foreign tourists, and to achieve information sharing internationally. However, the existing situation is that many translation versions of tourist texts are far from satisfactory.This paper, in view of functionalist approach, analyzes the existing translation problems of tourism texts and divides them into three types in general, namely linguistic errors, pragmatic errors, and cultural errors. Then six methods, such as literal translation, transliteration plus annotation and information restructuring, are proposed to approach these translation problems. It is hoped that the detailed analysis in the paper would be of some practical significance in improving the translation competence of foreign-related tourism workers, and the proposed strategies and methods would provide a reference for the translation of tourist publicity texts so as to help raise the quality and communicative effects of tourism text translation, and promote the international status of China as an international tourist country.