CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION
1.1 Rationale and Significance of the Study
World Tourism Organization defines “tourism” as follows: “tourism comprises the activities of persons traveling to and staying in place outside their usual environment for not more than one consecutive year for leisure, business and other purposes not related to the exercise of an activity remunerated from within the place visited”2. It can be seen that tourism is an activity that gives people the chance to experience different life styles in different places. As the potential travelers may have little knowledge of the destinations, they usually search on the internet to learn more before embarking on the journey. Therefore, tourist text, the text introducing a particular scenic spot, plays an essential role. With the dramatic development of China’s tourism industry, the study on tourism text translation has been very popular and important in China. Since the English translations serve as the national image and publicize our tourism resources to the outside world, the quality of tourism text translation is of great research value. In addition, despite the boom of Yunnan tourism, a considerable amount of the existing translations or English versions of scenic spots introductions are far from satisfactory. To improve English translation of tourism texts and make it more appealing to the foreign tourists, the author of this thesis intends to carry out a parallel text comparative study of Yunnan tourism texts under the guidance of functionalist translation theory.
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1.2 Research Questions
This current comparative study on Chinese and English versions of Yunnan tourism text intends to explore the following three specific questions: (1) What are the features of the Chinese tourism texts of Yunnan and the English versions written by foreign professionals in terms of structure, language and function? (2) What are the linguistic, structural and functional problems existing in the English translation of Yunnan tourism texts? And how can parallel text comparison help to address these problems? (3) What are the functionalist translation strategies for improving the poorly translated tourism texts?
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CHAPTER TWO LITERATURE REVIEW
2.1 Previous Studies on Tourism Text Translation
As it is of great practical value, a considerable amount of researches have been made on tourism text translation from various approaches, such as contrastive text analysis, cross-cultural approach, cognitive psychology approach, relevance-theoretical approach, empirical approach, theme-highlighting approach, functionalist approach, and also parallel text approach. Before conducting the current study, it is better to review these enlightening researches approaches one by one as followed.Scholars like Jia Wenbo, Gao Jinling, Ji Aimei studied tourism text translation through a contrastive text analysis approach. Jia Wenbo (2003) compared English and Chinese tourism mate
