CuluralDifferencesandScenic-SpoTranslaion——akingWesLakeScenic-Spoasanexample_开题报告

Literature Review

1 .1Researches at Home 

 In China, many scholars, translators, professors and graduates have conducted a lot of researches in the translation of scenic-spot introductions by adopting different approaches. 

The researchers approaching scenic-spot introductions translation from the perspective of culture translation mainly include, Chen Gang （陈刚） , Jia Shunhou （贾顺 厚） , Zhang Ning （张宁） and Su Bing （苏冰） . Chen Gang, a famous scholar from Zhejiang University thinks highly of the translator’s cross-cultural communication competence. In his article “Cross-cultural Consciousness: A Must for Translators of Tour Guide Manuals”（陈刚, 2002, No.2: 38-41）, he deems that a translator should command relatively more cultural background knowledge about the scenic spots and the translator should not neglect the psychological factors of foreign tourists in order to serve them successfully. 

Jia Shunhou, a lecturer of Shanxi University, in his article “On the Cultural Adjustment of the Translation of the Chinese Tourist Materials” （贾顺厚 , 2002, No.4: 90-92） argues that in translation, translators should focus their attention on rendering the cultural message, and the translated versions may reflect Chinese culture so as to excite the curiosity of the potential foreign tourists. 

1.2Researches Abroad

In his book The Language of Tourism: A Sociolinguistic Perspective, Graham M.S. Dann (1996), an emeritus professor of tourism from the University of the West Indies, Barbados, who reveals that the language of tourism used as promotion has its own discourse. It is more sophisticated and comprehensive than people suppose. 

Through the magic of words, the language of tourism attempts to allure millions of potential tourists to take action and subsequently to manipulate their attitudes and behavior. The book sheds the first light on the language of tourism from the sociolinguistic perspective. It analyses the contents of various promotional materials through semiotic point of view. 

 Providing a highly original treatment, the book is of interest to all studying tourism from a social science perspective. In addition, it has important implications for tourism marketing and for professionals in the tourism industry. 

Genre analysis has also been adopted in the study of scenic-spot introductions. 

Italian scholar Erik Castello (2002) in his book Tourist-Information Texts: A Corpus- Based Study of Four Related Genres, aims to furnish a description of the language used in this kind of texts and of their structures, following a genre analysis approach and making use of corpus linguistics. By means of statistical and computational techniques it is shown how the frequencies of the linguistic features vary across four related genres, or subgenres, of tourist-information texts corresponding to four channels of transmission (brochures, magazines, tourist guides, and web-sites), thus typifying them. In the study the concept of genre is used as a theoretical framework accounting for all the findings emerging from this investigation and able, therefore, to highlight variation as well as uniformity across the related text types of tourist publications identified. 

The background of this study 

The growth of tourism has become a contemporary phenomenon experienced by all countries in the world. Since the early 1980s, the reform and opening-up policy has been boosting the development of China's tourist industry. Thanks to its rich tourism resources: high mountains, elegant rivers, springs and waterfalls, mysterious oriental culture, etc. China attracts a large number of foreign tourists every year. After entering WTO and the country's successfully hosting the 2008 Olympic Games, China will attract more and more foreign tourists in the years to come. China, according to Tourism 2020 Ysion, with her beauty and charm of historical sites and cultural relics as well as natural scenery, is predicted to be the world's largest tourism destination by 2020. English, as the global language, has become the most important language in receiving foreign tourists. The fast developing tourist industry requires not only diversified tourism resources, convenient transportation, comfortable accommodation and nice food, but also an appropriate language to make the attractions more attractive.

The significance of this study 

It is by no means easy to translate Chinese scenic-spot introductions into English. Owing to the cultural differences between China and the western countries, many difficulties occur and get in the way of the process of mutual-understandings. Many translators are accustomed to rendering scenic-spot introductions based on Chinese mindset and ways of expressions, which results in inaccuracies and mistakes in translated texts and weakens the effectives of publicity to the outside world. In today’s China, the translation quality of scenic-spot introductions is far from satisfactory due to countless spelling mistakes, grammatical mistakes and cultural misinterpretations, etc. These poor renderings will make a bad impression on the foreign tourists. Therefore, the study on this topic is extremely necessary and imperative. It is true that a few articles in this field have mushroomed in recent years, but most of them are written by the practitioners out of their translation experience and fail to provide a systematic and theoretical analysis of the existing problems in the English translation of Chinese scenic-spot introductions and provide effective solutions to these problems. It is of great significance to make an in-depth research on this topic probing into the problems and managing to improve the quality of translated texts.

This thesis is an attempt to give an in-depth analysis of the existing problems in the English translation of Chinese scenic-spot introductions base on taking West Lake Scenic-Spot as an example, and on the basis of the analysis, tentative solutions are suggested, which are based on the two essential notions of Nida’s functional equivalence theory. The author hopes that the translation quality of scenic-spot introductions can be improved, and more researches in this specialized field will be made in the future by translators in our country. 

 

4. Outline

Abstract

1 Introduction

2Theoretical Framework 

2.1An Overview of Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory 

2.2Cultural Differences and Scenic-Spot Translation 

3 Solutions to the Translation of West Lake Scenic-Spot Introductions 

  3.1Literal Translation 

  3.2Literal Translation with Annotation  

  3.3 Transliteration with Annotation 

  3.4Transliteration plus Literal Translation with Annotation 

4Conclusion

Reference

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