Chapter One Task Description
1.1 Background
A series of guidebooks published by China Travel and Tourism Press, Touring China introduces both Chinese and foreign visitors to all sorts of tourist resources in the country’s main provinces and municipalities and provides for tourists practical and accessible information and suggestions they need to have fun on their trips or journeys. Among its many features, the series focuses on offering guide services to people interested in self-organized trips and enabling them to have a memorable experience on their trips. In addition to guide services, the authors of the series also describe as a major part of the books the history, culture, and customs of the travel destination in question with relatively fine and poetic words and expressions based on the authors’ first-hand experiences in a bid to empower tourists to find whatever intrigues them. The guiding principle of this series is culture-oriented tourism.
About the division of tourist text, there are some different ideas. According to Cao Bo and Yao Zhong (2017: 124), “Written texts include applicative text, exposition, persuasive text, lyrical text (travelogue, for instance), etc.” Ding Dagang (2008: 187) mentioned that “post-trip texts are usually written to show the tourist’s emotions and feelings, written by the tourists themselves and can be viewed as a kind of information text that’s about a certain region.” Zhou Jingxing (1990: 54) wrote that “if we label all articles as literary and non-literary, then travelogues should be viewed as literary.” The author of this thesis believes this book has both the features of an applicative text (in this case, a travelogue) and a lyrical text, and can provide tourists with necessary information on trips and at the same time act as a recorder of travelogues.
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1.2 Purposes
First, this translation is intended to provide tourists with information on the province’s whole list of travel destinations through the rendering of the chapter of “Must-sees for Tourists.”
Second, it is aimed to attract tourists who are intrigued by the province’s history and cultural richness, and in turn to promote Yunnan’s historical and cultural charm through the tourists who have come to the province. In doing so, we are creating a platform for cultural exchanges between different ethnic groups.
Third, this translation is an attempt to explore the characteristics of the travelogue-like text, and the problems and solutions involved in rendering it into English, as this material is a typical example of this type of text. The author expects to gain some conclusions from this practice, to enrich the English translations of this kind of text and to provide some lessons to others
Fourth, the final objectives are to go some way towards the development of the province’s tourism by attracting tourists through words and help the people of Yunnan fasten the process of eliminating poverty through the advancement of tourism.
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Chapter Two Translation Procedures
2.1 Preparations for Translation
The preparations for this translation practice include theory, source text analysis, parallel texts and tools, among which theory and source text analysis are the most important. This section introduces Peter Newmark’s Communicative Approach to Translation and Correlative Approach to Translation and their relevance to this translation drill and this report. The section of source text analysis includes an introduction to text type, the characteristics of the source text, prospective reader group and the unification of proper nouns.
2.1.1 Analyzing Theory
Taking up his posts at many universities, Peter Newmark is a British translation theorist of the practical type, who has come under the influence of Eugene A. Nida, a contemporary translation theorist, and Michael Alexander Kirkwood Halliday, a functional linguist. It was the combination of the exploration of the history of and new ideas about western translation study and extensive research into other relevant subjects on the one hand and the influence of people like Nida, Halliday, and Catford on the other that led to Newmark’s innovative translation theory.
The Communicative Theory belongs to the language school, a branch of translation study, but is also related to the function school. The core of this theory is the strategy of communicative translation. Its opposite is the strategy of semantic translation. In the words of Newmark (1981: 39)
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2.2 The Process of Translation
It took the translator some three months to get the chosen translation material translated. Previous steps included searching for relevant facts, reading books, consulting the supervisor. This translation material was chosen based on the research fields and suggestions of the supervisor. Also, the translator consulted the works of previous researchers in deciding what to translate. After deciding what to translate and the brief contents of the thesis, the translator made a preliminary translation of the material and made some corrections to the translation according to the supervisor’s suggestions. In translating this piece, the translator encountered some difficulties about cultural background, wording, the style of the translation and translation strategies. Most of these difficulties were solved with the help of the supervisor. For example, according to a suggestion from the supervisor, the translator looked through a lot of websites set up for Yunnan’s tourism and solved difficulties about cultural background.
Below are some examples of the difficulties encountered. First, in “Must-sees for Tourists,” the introduction to the ten most extraordinary places of interest is written in a ‘compressed’ language, which is extremely typical of the Chinese language. The English language, however, prefers the speaker to state things as clearly as possible and not hide anything. To do this, the speaker needs to avoid any words and expressions that tend to make people think there are several possible implications. In this case, the translator needs to ‘entangle’ condensed Chinese words and expressions, restructure and express them in English. Furthermore, many four-character and six-character structures are used in this chapter, the language is slightly literary, and figures of speech, such as simile, personification, and parallelization, are employed fairly often.
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Chapter Three Case Study of Lexical and Syntactic Difficulties and Translation Methods .................. 23
3.1 Characteristic Expressions and Paraphrasing ................................... 23
3.2 Prose-like Sentences and Adaptation ........................... 25
3.3 Quotations from Ancient Works and Restructuring ........................ 30
Conclusion ................................ 33
Chapter Three Case Study of Lexical and Syntactic Difficulties and Translation Methods
3.1 Characteristic Expressions and Paraphrasing
As a geographic travelogue about Yunnan’s characteristic beauty spots, this translation material includes a lot of words and expressions about the province’s architecture, geography, history, food and even dialect. Although there are many possible ways to translate them, the translator must adopt an approach that is the most suitable for target reader. That is, the translator needs to pass on the meanings of these characteristic words and expressions in the most direct way in order to help readers understand them more easily and to realize the communicative purpose of the translation. In his description of ‘close translation’ when explaining his correlative approach to translation, Peter Newmark (1995: 38) said “there are cases where one language has a grammatical structure which has no equivalent in another, such as the English gerund or the phrasal verb, and paraphrase is therefore required.” That is to say, paraphrasing is useful in making the translation close in meaning to the original. This method can help target reader understand the exact meaning of the given content.
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Conclusion
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