The Practice Report On The English-Chinese Tourism Text Translation Of Liberia In The Perspective Of The Text Type Theory

Changsha University of Science and Technology in cooperation with Liberia University set up the first Confucius Institute in Liberia's capital city Monrovia in December 2008. It is an important window for cultural exchanges between China and Liberia. After the establishment of the Institute, the cultural exchanges between the two countries became closer. Regrettably, there have been no systematic Chinese materials of Liberia's politics, economy, culture and so on at present, which has brought inconvenience for Chinese to know Liberia. What's more, the current Chinese text for the tourism of Liberia is still hard to find, thus translating the English text for Liberia's tourism into Chinese has its cultural significance and practical value.This translation task includes the English materials about Liberia's tourism in more than 10,000 words, and there is no Chinese version before. Tourism texts refer to specialized discourses that transfer the information of attractions, knowledge and cultures. They generally have the features of simplicity, conciseness, impressiveness and functionality. Thus, the translation must reflect the informative and operational functions of the tourism text, and must be accurate, clear, attractive, and suitable for different levels of the readers to understand and accept. The tourism text of Liberia is a tourist guide and also tourism brochure, its main part is the major attractions in Liberia. Attractions are the translation emphasis and difficulty in this article.The Text Type theory was raised by the leader of German functionalist school Katharina Reiss in Translation Criticism: the Potentials and Limitations(1971), and it was based on German function linguist Karl K. Buhler's Language Function Trichotomy. According to Karl K. Buhler's theory, Reiss recommends that the text can be divided into three main types, namely, informative type, expressive type and operational type, and describes the overall relationship between the various types of text and translation strategies. What is special about the theory is that it focuses on translation, and the classification of the text, the analysis of language function, language features, communicative situation and information focus, and so on are all for seeking reasons of the translation strategies. This thesis is analyzed with three translation strategies: diction, structural adjustment and translation variation on the basis of the theory.