Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Background information of the translation
Sweeping the world with overwhelming energy like a seaquake, tourism, as David Lodge proclaimed in his novel Paradise News, is becoming the new global religion. Now we can take the opportunity to show the world Chinese culture. Non-governmental exchanges should not be slackened, and it can be a good opportunity to bridge between cultures by translation. Accurate and elegant translation of tourism texts helps to spread culture effectively.
The author of the report, as native of Gansu province, is indeed honored to be invited by Gansu Tourism Training Center to translate the Commentary of Kangxian County. It mainly introduces the geographical features, historical evolution and natural scenery of Kangxian County, with detailed travel strategies planned for tourists. The author has signed the official document with the client for a period of 80 days. During the period, the author should keep communication with the client, accept the client's suggestions and amendments and revised at any time. During the actual translation process, the author made great efforts on resolving difficulties encountered in preparation work before translation, translation process. The final version will be presented in fragments with illustrations on the website Gansu Tourism Service Portal, the author sought for perfection in every part of the report.
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1.2 Significance of the report
There exist practical cultural promotion and market benefits in the report. The unique landscape and customs of Kangxian County are coming into the eyes of people all over the world with the promotion of the website Gansu Tourism Public Service Portal. However some current translation manual of vague language cannot accurately convey the relevant contents, Inaccurate, ambiguous, and inferior translation fails to show up original beauty and unique customs of local attractions, and hinder cultural output. And there is some room for improvement of tourism translation.
The author dug deeply into translating the material, insisted on readers as orientation by applying Reception theory. In dealing with the difficulties appeared in translating, the author combined the Reception theory with practical translation
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Chapter Two Task Description
2.1 Source text analysis
The source text is a typical tourism text with a special applied literary form whose form is flexible and diverse; the content is all-embracing; the words are vivid and smooth. That tourism translation is comprehensive, global, cultural, political, economic, commercial, educational, academic, professional, recreational, entertaining, interesting, religious, national, applied, and interdisciplinary is destined to be with a large vocabulary.
“Tour Commentary of Kangxian County " comes from the official website with detailed introduction and rich illustrations. Not only does it mainly reflect the geographical features and natural scenery of Kangxian County, but it also includes detailed travel strategies made for tourists, as well as historical evolution and economic construction. For such text translation, we need not only a grasp of the language, but also relevant historical and cultural details.
The text of the translation practice was entrusted by Gansu Tourism Training Center and required to be completed within three months. In order to ensure the quality and quantity of the translation work, the author of the report divided the source text into four parts for translation and each part has almost 3000 Chinese characters. The author kept communication with relevant personnel of the tourism bureau to understand their requirements for text translation as follows:
1) The translated text needs to be smooth and clear in meaning and cannot be translated by machine.
2) The words used in translating texts need to be accurate and elegant, and the texts need to be fluent.
3) Finish the work in time according to the translation plan.
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2.2 Before translation
Before translation, the author made a comprehensive and specific preparations, including the selection of translation tools, parallel text guided translation theories and strategies, and exactly, a detailed, feasible plan to escort the task.
The translation material belongs to tourism text with distinct local characteristics, contains a large number of specialized terms, therefore, the author made a detailed understanding of the local characteristics described in the original, collected plentiful translation tools, and applied the Theory of Reception Aesthetics as the guided one. Meanwhile, the author made a detailed plan to complete the translation task in seven stages and submitted the final version in July in accordance with the requirements of the client.
“Tour Commentary of Kangxian County” comes from the official and has detailed introduction and abundant illustrations. It mainly introduces the geographical features, historical evolution and natural scenery of Kangxian County with detailed travel strategies planned for tourists. In the preparation work, the author not only understood the background, but also fully browsed the relevant contents of the website and clarified what is expected by the reader, once again made certain of the important and difficult points and requirements of the task.
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Chapter Three Translation Process ................................. 3
3.1 Before translation .................................. 3
3.1.1 Preparation for background information .................................. 3
3.1.2 Translation tools and resources ...................................... 4
Chapter Four Case Analysis ......................................... 15
4.1 Difficulty of translating on lexical level .......................... 17
4.2 Difficulty of translating on syntactic level ................... 17
Chapter Five Conclusion ........................................ 22
5.1 Unsolved problems and related reflection ................................... 22
5.2 Implication for future study ............................. 22
Chapter Four Case Analysis
4.1 Difficulty of translating on lexical level
The original, belonging to typical tourism text, is filled with a large number of local terms. Based on the nature of the original, the author solved the translation of place names and local terms by transliteration.
There are great differences of the expression and syntactic structure between the Chinese and English. There are a great number of parallelisms composed of idioms and four-character words in tourism texts. The author used to restructure the sentence in translating in terms of expression of English. In dealing with the difficulties of translating on syntactic level, the author is guided by the Reception theory in adopting with strategies of division, combination and reconstruction.
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Chapter Five Conclusion
5.1 Unsolved problems and related reflection
reference(omitted)