A Report On The Translation Of The Travel Guide Fodor’s Travel:LONDON(Excerpted)

With the rapid development of China’s economy and the improvement of people’s living standards,great changes have taken place in consumption and entertainment.In recent years,traveling has become a choice of entertainment for more and more Chinese citizens,especially outbound travel,showing a trend of rapid growth.The introduction of foreign original travel guides and the completion of high-quality translation of travel guides are essential to meet the needs of Chinese flourishing outbound tourism.The source text of this translation practice is selected from the London travel guide Fodor’s Travel:London(2019)published by the world-famous American publishing house Random House in 2019.The guide gives a detailed introduction to all aspects of London tourism,including introducing tourist destinations,providing travel plans,transportation and catering information,and giving introduction to London’s history and culture.The author of this thesis completes this translation practice based on the classification of text types by Katharina Reiss,the founder of the German functionalist approaches to translation.According to Reiss’ definition of informative text,expressive text and operative text,the source text mainly consists of informative text and expressive text.And according to the purpose and language functions of different text types,the present author adopts different translation methods.To translate informative text,the translator should convey the specific information in the original text as accurately as possible.Therefore,the present author applies translation methods such as annotation and zero translation;when translating place names,the transliteration of "proper name"plus the literal translation of "common name" are generally used.For less known place names,the method of zero translation of "proper name" plus literal translation of"common name" is adopted;at the same time,due to the time gap between the publication time of the original text and the translation work,the author has updated the outdated information in the source text.When translating expression texts,the translator should pay attention to the emotional attitude expressed by the original author,and strive to achieve an aesthetic effect equivalent to the original text,rather than focusing on the specific information in the text.Therefore,to translate such texts,the author mainly applies the free translation method,and at the same time,uses the translation method of omission to delete some unnecessary information.This translation practice shows that Reiss’ text typology is applicable for the translation of travel guides,and it also provides reference for the choice of translation methods.Although there are some shortcomings in this research,the author of this thesis hopes that this practice can give some implications to the translators who are going to be engaged in the English-Chinese translation of travel guides in the future.