Abstract

With the economic globalization, transnational tourism not only have become a popular hobby, but also become a powerful driving force to boost economic growth for a country. China has an outstanding historical culture of 5000 years, beautiful landscapes and exquisite pavilions which can be used as abundant tourism resources. Among the visitors to China, some of them have a deep research to the Chinese culture, but for the vast majority of tourists, they know little about China. A wide range of materials has become their first tourism resource of China. Tourism materials used by people on the market are abundant, but quality of that is not so much satisfying. Especially ,when translators did not notice cultural differences between the east and west, translations will become obscure or very different from the original texts.

Nida' functional equivalence theory and Rice’s text type theory are the theory bases of this thesis. It takes content analysis as research methods, and is committed to the analysis of major cultural differences involved in tourism translation and finding the guiding principles of dealing with cultural differences in translation. The thesis firstly discusses the basic background knowledge, including the concepts of culture and translation, their relationship. The core of this thesis is analyzing culture differences in detail, after that, it will put up with some problems in tourism translation. At last, it seek a guide theory for tourism translation to solve these problems. This article supports to combine Skopos Theory, Rice’s text theory and Nina's Function equivalence theory together as a guidance to tourism translation, and advocates that tourism translation should not be constrained to form, but be faithful to its function, changing flexibly.

I made this article through research and analysis, hoping to provide reference for future tourists.

Key words: tourism material, cultural differences, tourism translation,text-type theory, functional equivalence theory