A Report On The C-E Translation Of Enshi Tourist Guidebook From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

With the overwhelming tide of globalization and the accelerating pace of China's reform and opening-up,more and more foreign tourists,attracted by its gorgeous and abundant natural scenery and historical heritages across the country,take China as a must destination.Because of its ethnic features of Tujia and Miao nationalities,which are displayed in Enshi Tourist Guidebook,Enshi,a minority autonomous region in Hubei Province,is becoming more and more popular among tourists at home and abroad.The primary purpose of Chines to English(C-E)translation of tourist texts is to attract foreign tourists,so more and more attention has been paid to the quality of the C-E tourist texts for the increasing competitive pressure in the tourist market.Both in promoting the development of regional tourist resources and external publicity of tourist culture,the C-E translation of tourist texts is of great importance.The source text Enshi Tourist Guidebook of this thesis is a kind of tourist text.The quality of the C-E translation of tourist texts plays a significant role in the development of the regional tourism.Most of the Chinese tourist texts are full of gorgeous expressions,such as idioms and poems,relying heavily on rhetorical devices rather than the clear presentation of tourist materials.Moreover,most Chinese tourist texts have quoted lines from the ancient Chinese poems to adorn the prose and poetic beauty.In sharp contrast,English tourist texts attach greater importance to precise and concise expression of crucial information.English tourist texts always stick to easy,incisive,compendious,and proper expressions.Therefore,good C-E translation of tourist texts should focus on both deep understandings of the source text and the proper expression of the target text.Based on the C-E translation experience of Enshi Tourist Guidebook and the features of the source text,this thesis will explore how to choose proper translating strategies,such as literal translation and liberal translation under the guidance of the three rules of Skopos Theory from German functionalist theory,including skopos rule,coherence rule,and fidelity rule.To be specific,from the perspective of lexical level,sentence structure and textual characteristics,the author has tried to thoroughly analyze the core and difficult points of the C-E translation of Enshi Tourist Guidebook,and demonstrate with representative translation examples the translation skills such as combination,simplification,conversion and so on,hoping to offer some reference to the future C-E translation of tourist texts of a region inhabited by minority groups with substantial Chinese and minority cultural characteristics.