In this text, the word “najestic” is misspelled as “majestic”; “Yangtze valley” is misspelled as “Yangze valley”; Can “山河” be translated into “hills and rivers”? It should be noted that linguistic mistakes occupy the most conspicuous part in the tourism publications.
2. 2 Cultural errors
The style of the Chinese language sounds flamboyant compared with that of English. Chinese writers often like to employ flowery descriptions and quote copiously from many sources in order to add a strong literary flavor when writing.The following examples show the tendency:
(3) The source text:
黄山“四绝”中， 云海最为瑰丽神奇。《安徽省志 黄山图》载，“又时有云铺海之奇。山半出云，一白无际，微风鼓荡，尤为奇观。”出现云铺海时，“海”中烟云翻飞，波澜起伏，浩瀚似海，且变化无穷。郭沫若赞曰：“瞬息万变万万变，忽隐忽现，或浓或淡，胜似梦境之迷离。”
The target text:
Of the four unique scenic features of Huangshan Mountain, the sea of clouds is probably the most fascinating and magnificent. In Historical Records of Anhui Province, there is the following description: “Often the wonderful sight of clouds forming up into a limitless expanse of White Sea is presented before the eye, heaving up and down the mid-slopes of the peaks.” When such a sight presents itself, the misty clouds will swell up and roll like billows, undergoing a phantasmagoria of instantaneous changes. As Guo Moruo, the 20th century Chinese writer once said in praise of the scene, “Myriads of changes are followed by myriads and myriads more. The clouds are altering here and there, now thickening and now thinning, more mysterious than what one sees in a dream.”
For Chinese readers, the Chinese version is no doubt an enchanting and impressive description. Yet, it is obvious that in the English version the beauty described becomes something like a heap of adjectives and nouns. Chinese tourism materials are merited with vivid descriptions of the scenery of the place. It is by no means an easy job to translate these texts abundant in such challenging rhetorical devices. Sometimes, even if a verbatim version has been wrestled out, it usually turns out to be inefficient, let alone be verbose. The example（1） is a good instance to show this question. How can the whip stand? What scenes are like antique? And some blurry expression make the English people feel inexplicability from the version, such as “Fantastic but actual”, “dreamy but real”. In English culture, they believe that “a proper word in a proper place is good English.” Thus they would consider this kind of texts too flowery and verbose to be less convincing [4]. So a few simple modifications to this version would greatly improve it.
3000 crags rise in various shapes_ pillars, columns, walls, shaky egg stacks and potted landscapes…conjuring up fantastic and unforgettable images.
2. 3 Pragmatic errors
To translate the Chinese texts into English, the translator should give prominence to the style of English texts, change the way of Chinese thinking, stand out the rationalistic. In addition, many tourism materials are translated word for word and sentence for sentence. Therefore, the translation may be lexically and grammatically right after careful examination, but it often suffers pragmatic errors, which are caused by inadequate solutions to pragmatic translation problems such as a lack of readership-oriented.
Here cultural terms refer to words and expressions peculiar to a certain culture, such as historical figures, names of emperors and times of dynasty. In the translation of tourism materials, the intended readers of originals are Chinese. In case of rendering the Chinese texts into English, problems may arise. Chinese is often opaque and strange to foreign readers. Some translators take it for granted that English readers understand the cultural terms and give no further explanations or other references. In fact, most of the English readers, who lack the background knowledge about Chinese culture, can hardly appreciate these translations.
The following example can well illustrate this,
As a natural lake, the Daming Lake has the earliest written record in Shujing Annotation of the Beiwei Dynasty. The names for the lake were Lotus Lake or Lishui Waves in the Sui and Tang Dynasty, the West Lake in the Song Dynasty and the Daming Lake in Jin-Yuan Dynasty. Of the numerous stele carvings and stone tablets, the famous one was written by He Shaoji of the Qing Dynasty. The lines were quoted from a poem by Du Fu of the Tang Dynasty: “Of pavilions west of the sea, this one is the oldest; of the eminent scholars, Jinan has the most.” There are also couplets by Tie Bao, stele notes by He Shaoji and Weng Fanggang, all showing rich cultural connotations and a high level of art [5].
Reading the passage, English readers may be completely lost in the maze of the italic cultural terms. There are so many terms concerning feudal dynasties and emperors, historical figures and classical works as well as Chinese allusions and idioms that few of them are familiar to English readers. So many cultural terms without any supplementary reference will hinder readers from understanding the text well. Thus, this text about the Daming Lake will fail to attract English tourisms, who will be confused and frustrated in their laborious reading of so much unknown cultural information.
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