Parallel Text's Application In C-E Translation Of Tourist Texts From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

With the rapid development of China's economy,the proceeding of the reform and opening-up and shifts in the public consumption concepts,the tourism industry has rapidly developed into an emerging industry.As the capital city,Fuzhou is the political,economic and cultural center of Fujian province.It is adjacent to the East Sea in the east,facing the Taiwan Island across the Taiwan Strait.Fuzhou is also a famous historical and cultural city that boasts over 2000 years of history.Endowed with rich cultural,historical and natural tourism resources,Fuzhou is attracting an increasing number of tourists from all over the world.The English versions of tourist texts plays a vital role in publicizing natural attractions and culture to the outside world,which makes it necessary to attach more attention to the translation of the tourist materials.However,the overall quality of tourist translation at the present time is far from perfect and does not do justice to Fuzhou's rich connotations in tourism resources.Many reasons lead to the poor quality of tourist texts,and it is urgent to improve the current translation to promote the city's destination image.Over the past decades,the research on tourist translation both at home and abroad has been burgeoning.Other disciplines such as linguistic,literary,cultural theories etc have been introduced and applied into the research of tourist translation,leading to new achievements.Modern technology,taking the network and corpus for example,has offered more possibilities and space for further improvement.Despite great achievements made,translators,especially novice translators,would still find difficulties in practice when faced with complicated linguistic and non-linguistic problems.In this study,Skopos theory is chosen as the theoretical guidance on C-E translation of tourist texts in Fuzhou.Meanwhile,the parallel text approach is employed with a view to exploring solutions to problems in practice.Parallel text is defined in this paper as authentic,non-translated texts chosen from the target-culture text repertoire.We find that Skopos theory provides the field with new prospective.Under the direction of Skopos theory,having a good grasp of the respective features of Chinese and English parallel texts may enable translators in a better position to make corresponding adjustments in the aspects of vocabulary,sentence patterns and textual structures in the rendering process so as to win over the recognition of target audience as much as possible.It also helps deal with problems found in the translated tourist texts.With ample evidence of putting theoretical assumptions into practice,the study proves the feasibility of utilizing parallel texts in tourist translation.It also carries enlightenments for novice translators to overcome linguistic and cultural hurdles in the translation,and it is hoped that the practical and efficient strategies may be applied to other types of translation in the future.