旅游宣传材料翻译的跨文化审视(英文)

Abstract: Tourism publicity materials, as a principal means of promoting tourism in China, serve the functions of both informing the readers of the tourism product and persuading readers to purchase them. An overall study on the translation of Chinese tourism publicity materials is not only a necessary but an urgent task. At present, some translators have realized the importance of this study and have done research on this topic. However, from the cross-cultural perspective this subject needs to be further researched. This paper attempts to make a systematic study on the translation of Chinese tourism materials from cross-cultural perspective by meticulously selecting many fresh examples. The author lays emphasis on the following aspects: the relationship between language and culture, the problems of translation in the English versions and proposed methods of translating the tourism materials of scenic spots.

Key words: Tourism materials; Culture; Translation

摘 要：旅游宣传资料作为对外推广的媒介，它对中国旅游业的发展起到了重要的作用，具有向游客提供信息及促进消费的功能。因此，旅游宣传文本的翻译是具有必要性和紧迫性的。目前，已经有很多译者开始研究这一课题，但是从跨文化角度上看，他们的研究还远远不够。本文将从跨文化的角度来对旅游宣传文本的翻译做系统的研究，主要从英汉旅游文体的语言特色和风格差异、在翻译景点宣传材料过程中出现的问题、景点宣传材料的翻译方法等几个方面来解析旅游宣传材料的翻译。
关键词： 旅游宣传材料；文化；翻译

Introduction
Tourism in today’s China is an increasingly booming industry owing to the opening and reform policy and the rise of multinational exchange and corporation. With its rapid development, more and more foreigners are becoming interested in China’s long-standing history and unique culture, beautiful scenery and attractive historical sites. Under this circumstance, as the publicity materials play a significant role and need to be translated into English in much larger quantity and higher quality. So a large number of tourism materials written in English or translated into English have been published. However, the quality of these materials is far from satisfactory. In many tourism attractions, some translators due to lack of intercultural awareness and ignorance of visitors’ diverse cultural backgrounds so that some poor-quality English versions of tourism materials can be seen at certain places. Therefore, the translation of tourism materials from the perspective of cultural differences must be further studied. Based on the above analysis, this thesis is intended to approach the translation of tourism materials from cross-cultural perspective. In a sense, a relatively full and proper transference of a cultural message can help western tourisms get a better understanding of Chinese culture. This article will explores this issue from the following aspects: relations between culture, language and translation, translation problems in the English versions of tourism materials, proposed methods of the translating the names of scenic spots.

1  Cultural differences and translation
The nation of Chinese and the nation of English belong to two different cultural areas. Their different environment, history, the way of life are form their different ways of thinking, cultural tradition and aesthetic eye.
1. 1 Cultural characteristics of tourism publicity materials
The Chinese is the pith of the special social course of Chinese nation. It emphasizes that the nature and men should be harmonized. When a writer see a thing, he will have association of idea and select some subjective words to express his feeling and emotions. That is to say, people can not use words to depict the color of spring, but he can describe the spring by describing flower and grass. According to the sentence, we can see that Chinese have dense subjectivism. In the last archaic poems “落霞与孤鹜齐飞，秋水共长天一色”、“无边落木萧萧下，不尽长江滚滚来”the Chinese’ subjectivism clearly is incarnated clearly. The poem full of the faraway artistic conception. But, in this aspect, the western aesthetic opinion is widely divergent, the westerns pay more attention to the abstract, and stress on copy and reappearance. Aristotle thought that the art comes from apery, and this viewpoint filters in the western literature so deeply that the realism, romanticism, naturalism all come from the apery theory, for example, Then came the twilight colours of sea and heaven, the winepink width of water merging into lawns of aquamarines, the sky a tender palette of pink and blue.