A Study Of English Tourist Information Texts From The Perspective Of Genre Analysis

With the rapid development of China's economy and the adoption of the reform and opening-up policy, China has become a hot destination of world tourism. More and more foreigners are eager to catch a glimpse of the beautiful landscapes in China and get to know its five thousand years'civilization. Since China's domestic tourism increasingly flourishes, English tourism information texts (English TIT) have become the great channel to communicate with the potential foreign customers. However, there seems lack of a standard for the English TIT translation and writing in China, and there are distinct differences between English TIT directly translated from Chinese into English and those generally accepted in the world pattern. Therefore, they usually cannot achieve goals of advertising, communicating and attracting foreign tourists.Genre analysis is a new development of discourse analysis research, and it is also the product of the cross study of many subjects, such as linguistics, social sciences and translation. In this paper, we will adopt genre analysis as the theoretical framework and research methodology, and take the English TIT of Beijing as examples and make a comparative study on both macro-and micro-structure of 20 English TIT articles. Furthermore, we have also worked out some translation methods influenced by move-functions and cultural differences.The research results show that as a kind of publicity materials targeting foreigners, the main purposes of the English TIT are to attract tourists, stimulate their interest in scenic spots, and obtain the relevant knowledge. It is also used to persuade potential tourists to visit a destination or enjoy tourist service facilities. In order to achieve these communicative purposes, a standard English TIT includes 12 moves, Two of which are compulsory moves while the others are optional ones.This paper is written at the aim of reveals the genre structure of standard English TIT, as well as providing genre guidance for choosing the writing and translating strategies of English TIT, thus by comprehensively considering social background, text function and both macro-and micro-structure, we are able to learn some translation methods and strategies to make the translation of tourist information texts more effective.