Rewriting As A Strategy In Tourism Texts Trasnlation:A Comparable Model

Based on a small-scaled self-built comparable corpus,this thesis is intended to research into the feasibility and operational rules of rewriting strategy in tourism texts translation after identifying the text type and communicative purpose of tourism text.In this study,contrastive analyses are to be carried out to probe into the linguistic features and stylistic features of tourism texts embodied in the corpora so as to adopt the optimal translation strategy according to Peter Newmark’s translation typology.This study clarifies research questions and methods,explores the linguistic and stylistic features of tourism texts,discusses the theoretical basis of rewriting strategy in practical writings,and aims to work out an effective way to translate tourism texts from Chinese to English by the way of building comparable corpora.The contrastive analysis is mainly approached on the following two levels: one is linguistic level,and the other,stylistic level.On the linguistic level,an investigation into the basic statistics of the corpus is conducted to obtain and compare the standardized type/token ratio and lexical density,mean word length,and specific linguistic items including use of high-frequency nouns,adjectives,adverbs and verbs in COETT and CTETT;On the stylistic level,lexical features including personal pronouns,nominalization of verbs and syntactic features including distribution of voices and tenses in COETT and CTETT have been examined in detail.After the contrastive analyses,the author finds that: 1)compared with COETT,the occurrences of passive voice in CTETT are greatly higher;2)in CTETT,the use of perfect tense is more frequent,indicating that more emphasis is laid on the continuity and influence on current situation of an activity;3)the use of conjunctions in the two sub-corpora is different in that conjunctions which usually introduce clauses including as,than,that,whether,and subordinating conjunctions like if,because,unless,so and for in COETT are less frequent than in CTETT.The research findings demonstrate that original English tourism texts are different from translated English tourism texts on both linguistic level and stylistic level,which makes it imperative to rewrite in tourism texts translation.Considering the differences between original and translated English tourism texts,the author of the current research proposes obligatory rewriting and optional rewriting in term of different elements in the translation process so that he/she can produce acceptable translated texts conforming to target readers’ expectation.