旅行社网站翻译存在问题及对策

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  摘 要:随着全球化的快速发展和更广泛的世界文化交流,人们倾向于环游世界去体验异国情调。因此,越来越多的内地旅行社建立了英文网站吸引外国游客。然而,由于缺乏系统的翻译理论指导,这类网站普遍存在语言质量低,内容枯燥空乏,实用性不强和忽略受众需求等问题,严重影响了对外宣传的效果。本文指出,译者缺少翻译目的意识是产生这些失误的根源。德国功能学派的目的论为翻译研究开启了全新的视角。本文运用“目的论”原理,从旅行社网站翻译的功能和目的性出发,选取我国一些知名旅行社网英文版中存在实用性、文化性、以及语言性翻译失误的现象,旨在为旅游网站的英译提出建议,那就是时刻牢记翻译目的。
  关键词:旅游资料; 旅行社网站; 翻译目的论; 翻译要求
  Abstract: With the rapid development of the globalization and more extensive cultural communication between countries, people tend to travel all over the world to experience the exotic atmosphere. Therefore, more and more domestic travel agencies set up their own English websites to attract visitors of foreign countries. However, owing to a lack of systematic and practical theory, it is a pity that the problems of low quality in language, void contents, low real utility and ignorance of reader’s need seriously affect those websites’ publicity. This paper points out the root cause of these translation errors — the translator’s insufficient translation purpose. Functionalist School puts forward skopostherorie and shows a new perspective for translation studies. Following the principles of this theory, this paper makes an analysis of functional, cultural and linguistic translation errors in the English version of China International Travel service, aiming at giving a suggestion for its English translation, which is to bear in mind the intended purpose of translation.
  Key words: tourism texts; travel agency’s website; Skopotheory; translation purpose
  1 Introduction
  With the development of tourism, the website of a travel agency plays an important role in pushing out their tourism resources to the world. However, it is not easy to perfectly translate the material of tourism documents from Chinese to English due to the cultural difference between the eastern and western. As we all know, website is the window to the outside, and its function is becoming more and more important.
  Jia Wenbo (贾文波, 2014) systematically analyses the politics and other application problems. He makes an in-depth discussion on the application of translation. Liu Meihua (刘美华, 2009) analyzes the teleological purpose principle, coherent rules and text type of applied translation guidance and points out that there is a close relationship between the functional translation theory and application research, which has a great significance for translation. Lin Yuhua (林玉华, 2007) expounds the function of information and features of translation through the skopos theory. She puts forward some specific methods in translation by analyzing the tourism information. Lu Guofei (陆国飞, 2006) demonstrates that the translator’s inadequate purpose consciousness is the root cause of these translation errors from the perspective of functional and purpose of translation with the skopos theory by some attraction English version.   All above analysis mainly focuses on the tourism translation and are rarely involved in the website translation. There is no doubt that the internet plays an important role in spreading information in the 21st century. However, there is a lack of theory guidance in website translation. And the most important thing is that the travel agency pays little attention to the English version of its website.
  From the viewpoint of skopos theory, translation breaks the constriction of traditional equivalence and puts the expected purpose of original text in the first place. At the same time, the skopos theory puts emphasis on the role of translator and the text in the process of translation and has positively instructional significance to the translation in website.
  Following the principle of skopos theory, this paper will focus on the analysis of functional, cultural and linguistics translation errors in travel agency websites. This paper also applies the skopos theory in the study of translation which is supposed to help tourist website find out the uniform and rule-governed principle and methods, and will improve the quality of the translation in our Chinese tourist website as well as have a profound meaning to our Chinese company’s change and cooperation with others. We hope that the translator should pay more attention to their website translation through this paper research and make it full use of the website to achieve the best expectation.
  2Skopos theory and the analysis of text typology
  Tourism information is a combination of informative text, expression text and imperative text. And it also has the function of expressing information, of transition aesthetic perception as well as imperative effects. Based on the principle of “readers first” -- to put the reader in the first place, the translator should depend on the forecast of the translation to achieve purpose or function, conform to the target language cultural ideas and modes of the structure of language expression so that the translation language can attract the target language readers most (Reiss, 2000). As a result, the Skopos theory is the most suitable theoretical basis to guide the translation in this field.
  In order to explain clearly how Skopos theory can guide English translation of travel agency’s website, the following part gives a brief introduction of the Skopos theory and the analysis of text typology.
  2.1 Skopos theory
  The Skopos theory is an approach to translation which was put forward by Hans Vemeer. It developed in Germany in the late 1970s and was oriented more functionally and socio-culturally. Translation is considered not as a process of translation, but as a specific form of human action (钟伟合, 1993). In our mind, translation has a purpose, and the word “Skopos” was from Greek. It is used as the technical term for the purpose of the translation (林玉华, 2007). According to the Skopostheorie, there are three rules in Skopos theory: purposes rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule. The relationship between them is the coherence rule and fidelity rule abided by the purposes rule. That is to say, during the translation process, the translator should not only pay attention to language reform, but also focus on the purpose of the whole translation. As to the translation in travel agency’s websites, the translator should keep in mind that one of the important goals is to attract the foreigners and make them curious about the tourist resort.   2.2 The analysis of text typology
  In this part, the author will introduce text typology to make it clear that it is necessary to analyze the type of the original text in order to achieve successful translation.
  Based on Karl Buhler’s three fold division of language function, Reiss proposes her text typology by linking language function to translation strategies and translation methods(张美芳,2005). She proposes that there are three language functions: the informative, the expressive and vocative function.
  The informative function provides us with the facts, such as information, knowledge and thought. The expressive function pays more attention to the attitude of author. The vocative function aims to be infected with the reader and get the expectant result and pay more attention to the reflection of the reader (Nida, 2001:123). The function of text still has primary and secondary, although all the function included in the each text. The original text original text of main function decided to the method of translation (ibid:189). It is not hard for us to get the conclusion that the function of persuasion and information are the mainly function of the advertisement.
  However, the function of the persuasion is the final goal and the function of the information is the way of achieving this final goal in advertisement. We can create the demand and promote the consumption by the advertisement so as to persuade this kind of people who are not intend to buy your product at first and they will be change their thoughts to purchase it ,when they realize the features of this product. When we build up our website and introduce our company, we have to consider these factors in order to attract the potential customer.
  3 The requirement of translation and Strategy under skopostheprie
  As discussed above, Skopostheorie provides a new perspective to translation. This part mainly deals with the matter of the requirement in travel website translation and strategy under the guidance of Skopostheorie.
  3.1 The requirement of translation
  Based on the previous theory, in order to achieve successful translation of travel agency’s website, one has to have a better understanding of functions and purposes of tourism text. According to Jia Wenbo, tourism texts include the introduction of scenic spots, the spread of advertisement slogan, the sign of advertisement, and the album of national customs. What is more, the introduction of scenic spots is the key as well as the most difficulty point (贾文波, 2004: 16). As to the scenic spots translation, its main purpose is to make the tourist resort known by the target readers, so that more foreigners may be attracted by the place and they may generate a strong desire to have a real look of it.   The purposes of all kinds of tourism text are to make foreign visitors understand its underlying meaning and get some relevant cultural knowledge. In order to make the travel agency website have a proper translation, the translator must know what the purpose of the translation is. Therefore, the translator should harbor a certain requirement of translation before translating including the target function, the target addressee and the media of the translation. Otherwise, there will be something wrong with the process of translating and could not achieve the purpose of translating. Here is the following assumption about English version translation of the travel agency website.
  3.1.1 The expected function of the text
  The functions of the target text and original text are basically the same, namely information function and appellative function. Information function refers to the information about the nature, cultural and customs of the original text (钟伟合, 1993). Appellative function refers to promote products and services. Vermeer said: “linguistics alone can not help us. First, translating is not merely and primarily a linguistic process. Second, because linguistics has yet formulated the right questions to tackle our problem. So, let’s look somewhere else.” (Nord, 2001)
  However, the Chinese version of the website served for domestic and ethnic Chinese, so the translation focus more on appellative function instead of information function which mainly served for the foreign tourists who are want to some practical information about the tourist destination.
  3.1.2 The target addressee of the text
  Target addressee is this kind of people who are interested in tourist spot (文月娥, 2008). In Skopos theory, the most important factors determining the purpose of a translation are the receivers, who are the audiences of the target text with their culture-specific knowledge, their needs and their communicative methods. Every translation is offered to the intended audience, since to translate means to produce a text in a target setting for a target purpose and target addresses in target circumstances (Nord, 2001:12).
  According to Newmark (2001), there are readers who are potential customer about website products and services: academic readers, good educated readers and little educated readers. However, compared with the original readers, whatever of them, they are lack of Chinese language, cultural and society information, which requires the appropriate compensation for the translator, such as: adding relevant background information and explanatory translation (段连城, 2004). What is more, the translator should be in line with the target language and culture to ensure the acceptability of the translation since the value of the original readers is different from target readers.   3.1.3 The Media of the translation
  From the perspective of Skopos theory, the most vital rule for any translation is the “Skopos rule”, which hold that a translational action is determined by its “Skopos”; that is “the end justifies the means” (Nord, 2001:29). The media connects the travel agency’s products with the target readers. The goal of it is to express the travel agency’s main ideas to the readers. During the process of translation, translators should remind themselves of the purpose of the media.
  In the process of travel website translation, the media should be the most basic material to get the skopos. The traditional media to propaganda their products and services is travel brochure (林婷婷, 2011). With the development of Internet, the website plays an important role in advertisement. When the foreigners surf the internet, they want to obtain the useful information for them. There is no doubt that the content of the website should be as concise and vivid as possible. As a result, more foreigners may be interested in the contents of the website, and the contents can reach their main goal of attracting tourists. If the translation of the website cannot catch the attention of the target readers, it has not enough effect on the readers. Thus, inadequate and irrelevant information for the target readers should be deleted. That is the reason why we should pay more attention to the information function.
  3.2 The translation strategy
  The translation purposes determine the specific methods of translation. To meet the demand of the function of the text and the readers, translator should determine his strategy based on the expected function of the target text (贾斯塔赫兹曼塔利, 1984).
  Nord (2001) makes a conclusion about translation method which is documentary translation and instrumental translation. The purpose of documentary translation is make the target readers put in the same position with the original readers to understand the content. Instrumental translation regards the original text as a material to choose so as to build up a new communication between the author and the reader. According to different functional equivalence, the instrumental translation also can be divided into the following two parts: equifunctional translation and homologous translation (ibid, 2001: 67). As to equifunctional translation, it aims to produce on the reader of target language text the similar effect with that of the original. For homologous translation, it will reflect the function of original literature context in the target literature context again and also have the same effect as the original text, which often appears in the translation of the poem.   From the above analysis of translation requirement and strategy, the translator should take instrumental translation. That is to say, the more language and cultural gap between the original text and target text, the more adjustment translators should do.
  The purpose of translation of tourism materials is to introduce tourists attractions for foreigners and pass on the relevant information, which makes foreign common visitors easier to read, understand, and appreciate, and realizes this communication function of the translation text , so as to promote the development of domestic tourism, and spread Chinese culture outside (陈刚, 2004). As to the translation of tourism materials, for one thing, it should contain Chinese culture as much as possible to spread the culture; for another, it should take the readers into consideration. Instead of ignoring the target language culture, constraint by mechanical corresponding to the original, translation of tourism materials should be purposeful and flexible rather than follow others’ ideas without thinking (纪俊超, 2002). What’s more, on the premise of not affecting the expression of ideas, it is proper to make a necessary and appropriate adjustment for the original text.
  4 Analysis of the translation errors and suggestions
  Although there are some researches done in this field, it is still difficult to avoid errors during the process of translation. In this part, the paper primarily talks about the analysis of the translation errors and gives some suggestions as well.
  4.1 Analysis of the translation errors
  The translation errors are defined as:“ if purpose of translation is achieve the function for the target address, so any hurdles to achieve it is called translation errors” (Nord, 2001:12). That is to say, the criteria for judging translation is not about the correct language and expression, but the purpose of translation that counts.
  Nord used a top-down hierarchy method that the translation errors can be summarized as four different functional types: pragmatic translation errors, cultural translation errors, linguistic translation errors and text-specific translation errors (Nord, 2001). According to those four patterns, this paper only discusses the three main types of translation errors which were found in travel agency website translation.
  4.1.1Analysis of the pragmatic translation errors
  Pragmatic translation errors are translation errors in the macro level which almost cover all translation errors in translation because they directly or indirectly damage translation. The reason of pragmatic translation errors is that the translator’s ignorance of the function and demand of the reader in the translating process. In the paper selected typical pragmatic translation errors are:   4.1.1.1 Unnecessary words that should have been deleted or simplified
  According to the Skopos theory, the original text is a source of information and the translator could not provide the same information as the original text (方梦之, 2002:15). During the process of translating, translators should choose different strategies to reach specific purposes. Generally, translators will provide the same information as in the source text so that all the information was not neglected. However, for tourism text, its purpose is to arouse the interest of the target readers to have a real look at the tourist attractions, and it aims to have a good understanding of the tourist resort (刘洪潮, 2005). Therefore, some unnecessary information which does not conform to the principle of correlation in the target text will bring some unnecessary trouble for the target readers and occupy the text space without any meaning and should be deleted or simplified.
  4.1.1.2 Necessary information that should not have been deleted or simplified
  In fact, in most cases, translation tends to delete the information that is necessary for the cultural communication. Translating is a process of choice, and the translator should select the information points in case they neglect some useful information. There are lots of cases in which information should be elaborated in detail, but they deleted or simplified. In fact, it is the same errors in the essence as above. Both of them are resulted from translators’ lack of purpose in translating and their ignorance of the information function
  4.1.2 Analysis of the cultural translation errors
  Cultural translation errors are a specific level of functional translation. For skopos theory, cultural translation errors refer to translation conflicts between target text and target cultural norms and practices.
  4.1.3 Analysis of the linguistic translation errors
  Linguistic translation errors are a specific level of cultural translation errors. If we regard language as a part of culture, and at the same time cultural a set of norms and system, the linguistic translation errors then can be defined as errors which violates language norms.
  In summary, to avoid the pragmatic translation errors, cultural translation errors and linguistics translation errors, the translator should choose corresponding method to reach the purpose of travel agency’s website.
  4.2 Suggestion
  According to the Skopostheory, there are some principles in the process of translation. As to the Skopos rule, it holds that prime principle determining any translation process is the purpose of the overall translational action. As a conclusion, translating travel website is a type of purposeful activity. Under the guidance of the functional approaches, we are supposed to keep in mind the intended communicative purpose, and accordingly adopt corresponding techniques to deal with the translation problems in an attempt to accomplish the function of our translation.   Although translations in travel website are really different from literature, science and technology translation, the translator need to carefully consider the features and translation strategy of theoretical knowledge and translation skills. Therefore, translators in the translating of travel agency website should pay attention to the characteristics and aims, which focus on the informative function and vocative function. The translator should take a proper method according to the translation brief such as explanation for translation, elimination and rewrite. The translator also has to possess certain abilities in order to do well in the translation, such as an excellent command of English and Chinese and a good mastery of translation theories, principles and techniques with special knowledge of travel and advertisement as well as a profound cultural perception.
  At last, the target text should avoid the pragmatic translation errors, cultural translation errors and linguistic translation errors in order to arouse the beauty of visitor’s heart and longings. Although many difficulties needed to be overcome, there are some new translation works and systematic research available. The prior scholars’ translation and research lay a good basis and place hopes upon us. So we should spare no efforts with confidence and courage to proceed further, making thorough exploration into travel website translation.
  5 Conclusion
  From the above analysis of some cases and errors, a natural conclusion can be reached as the followings: translator must take the purpose of the translation activity into consideration in order to gain better communicative effects and realize the purpose of translation——the purpose of both original author and translator. The Skopos theory points out that the purpose of the translation behaviors determines the strategy of accomplishing expected aims and the type of the text determines the translation strategy. During the translation process, the translator should adopt the appropriate strategies to avoid pragmatic, cultural and linguistic errors.
  Translation can be used for a kind of text process based on the original text, and the status of the original text should be decided by the translators, because they should spare no effort to choose which parts ought to be deleted or preserved instead of “sacred” according to the translation brief. From this point, Functionalism represented by skopos theory attempts to give a free direction of translation from the original text and show us a new perspective for travel agency website translation. Therefore, when we set up our website to advertise our products, we must consider carefully the psychology of our oversea customers, language trait and cultural difference. To meet the demands of them, we must put the theory into practice and establish a systematic strategy for this field, which is a sign we are succeed in travel advertisement.   References:
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  [5] 陈刚. 旅游翻译与涉外导游 [M]. 北京:中国对外翻译出版公司,2004.
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  [9] 贾斯塔赫兹曼塔利. 翻译行为-理论与方法 [M]. 上海:上海外国语出版社,1984.
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  作者简介:
  袁国,男,辽宁大连人,安康学院外语系教师,主要从事二语习得理论与实践,英语测试研究,英语课程设计,英语教学论等研究。
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摘 要:本文以许昌学院为例,探讨步入“翻转课堂”模式的大学英语教学,如何根据自身优势,充分把握学校转型发展和学校资源整合之契机,提升自身核心竞争力,以培养具备较高英汉双语交互能力的高素质应用型和复合型人才,助力当地经济和社会发展。  关键词:大学; 翻转课堂;高校教育资源;优化配置  高校教育资源是指政府、高校自身、受教育者和社会投入高校供其进行教育活动和维持教育事业持续发展的各种要素的总和。按形
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摘 要:优化课堂提问是优化课堂教学过程的关键,优化教学过程的主导者是教师,教师优化课堂提问应注意以下几点:①明确目的;②富有层次;③讲究艺术;④注意角度。  关键词:技巧;课堂提问;关键;优化  中小学实施以创新为核心的素质教育,其主渠道是课堂教学,而贯穿课堂教学过程的重要活动因素之一是课堂提问,因而研究课堂提问技巧是优化课堂教学过程的关键。  一、提高优化课堂提问意义的认识  优化课堂提问,其实
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摘 要:规律是人们在认识事物的过程中逐渐总结出来的事物之间的联系。任何学科在教学中都能够总结和发现规律,高中物理教学也不例外,我们可以在物理教学中发现和总结规律。那么,我们怎么才能在高中物理的课堂教学中,更好地对物理规律进行教学呢 ? 根据我的教学经验,给大家谈一谈高中物理中,物理规律教学的一些技巧和方法。  关键词:研究规律;科学施教;高中物理;教学  在高中物理教学中,如何寻找规律并进行规律教
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