A Report On The English Translation Of Touring China: Yunnan(Excerpt)

The research purpose of this translation report is to identify the lexical and syntactic difficulties and possible approaches in the English translation of a Chinese geographic travelogue.Such a text includes some words and expressions typical of classical Chinese and many literary and sometimes complicated sentences,suggesting that an inappropriate translation may hamper the reading experience of the readership,which,in turn,not only fails to pique their curiosity but may even repress it.If that happened,it would amount to a failure of the tourist destination to draw potential travelers and of the translator to fulfill the translation purpose and the mission as a whole.Peter Newmark's correlative approach and communicative approach to translation are the two research approaches adopted here.This report has two findings.First,this report defines the term ‘geographic travelogue' as a type of applied tourist text that is slightly literary.In its translation,the literary vocabularies and sentences it includes need to be rendered in simple everyday language.This may be accounted for in two aspects.Firstly,in doing so,the key information of the original can be passed on more quickly,and the communicative purpose of the translation can be better accomplished,as the informative and vocative functions are the two major functions that characterize this kind of applied tourist text.Secondly,it is reasonable to assume that the potential readers of a tourist text have different educational backgrounds.Therefore,it makes sense to use the most simplified language in its translation,make it more acceptable and maximize the value of its translation.Second,paraphrasing may be applied to the lexical difficulties in the English translation of such type of text;and adaptation and restructuring may be used for the syntactic difficulties.Paraphrasing helps the target reader to understand more easily the information to pass on,which serves the communicative purpose.As far as adaptation is concerned,it can help readers grab key information more quickly by deleting the flowery expressions unnecessary for the target reader.This is helpful in delivering the value of the translation and realizing the fundamental purpose of the applied tourist text,which is to draw tourists.Finally,it seems reasonable to believe that translating classical Chinese sentences literally usually fails to demonstrate clearly the logic within these sentences and therefore it is necessary to restructure the English translation of these sentences.That way,the target reader will have less difficulty understanding the meaning of the original and will be able to gather information more quickly.There is certain relevance between paraphrasing and adaptation: they both relate to reduction and serve one common purpose — to make the translation practical.In all,when translating this material,it is necessary to emphasize the informative and vocative functions because it is an applied tourist text.And the translation methods used need to serve the communicative purpose as well.