语篇角度上海旅游景点介绍的翻译(2)
Since the rise of discourse analysis, the focus of translation study and practice has shifted from the lower level of word to sentence or even paragraph up to the textual level. The translator does not translate words or inpidual sentences (unless an isolated sentence has test status), but texts. Translation, therefore, is a text-oriented event. Texts are the building blocks of communication in general and of translation in particular.
Text analysis studies have provided very useful guidelines for tourism translation. Thus, the thesis, with text analysis as the theoretical basis, attempts to explore effective strategies and approaches to tourism translation.
Meanwhile, as Shanghai tourism texts mainly cater to Chinese readers, when rendering them into English, the translator should take into special account the stylistic features of English tourism texts as well as westerners' aesthetic standard and thinking pattern or even cultural context in order to provide a translation that functions as that intended in the target situation. Therefore, the translator should be well acquainted with the differences between Chinese and English tourism texts so as to produce a successful translation. For this purpose, a comparative and contrastive analysis of Chinese and English tourism texts in association with those differences is conducted.
Based on previous analysis, a few translation strategies and approaches applicable to Chinese-English (C-E) translation of tourism texts are proposed and exemplified by some typical Shanghai tourism texts. These approaches include addition, omission, restructuring and rewriting etc. Through case studies, the thesis confirms that textual translation is of great help to guide C-E tourism translation. Owing to the great difference in language and culture, very often, the ways and means employed in the source text to achieve a certain function cannot function in the same manner in the target text. Thus, the translation involves necessary adjustment or adaptation of the source text in order to make the translation understandable and acceptable to target readers.
2 Theoretical Basis for Shanghai Tourism Translation
In recent years, there has been an incredible increase in the number of paper or documents studying translation from a linguistic point of view. Many books and articles were published concerning the relationship between translation and text. They hold that good translation which aims at reproducing the message of the original can be achieved by textual analysis. In this sense, it is of critical importance for this paper to take text into consideration, attempting to find possible solutions to sort out translation paradoxes.
2.1 Definition of Text
Chinese scholar Hu Zhuanglin concludes that “a text could be as short as a single word or as long as a whole novel, so long as it assumes a complete and intact communicative function” (1994:2). In a similar definition, Brown and Yule argue that “a text is the verbal record of a communicative act.”(2000:6). According to the founder of the Systemic Functional Grammar, Halliday defines a text as “an instance of social meaning in a particular context of situation.” (1994:23 ) Despite all the different expressions in the definitions of text, it is generally accepted that text is the means of exchange of meanings among social members in certain contexts.
2.2 Textual Translation
More and more scholars on translation theory now agree that before embarking upon any translation, the translator should analyze the text comprehensively, since this appears to be the only way of ensuring that the source text (ST) has been wholly and correctly understood. In this sense, translations based on models of text analysis tend to be applied in the study of interpretation in a broader aspect.
The term “textual translation”, in turn, has been proposed by many scholars. Among those, Li Yunxing is one of the most influential. As put forward by Li Yunxing," textual translation is basically the translation operating based on texts." (2002:15) Besides, he points out three major characteristics of the textual translation as follows: