Translation Quality Assessment of Chinese and English Translated Tourist

Websites

Zhang Fan
THESIS PROPOSAL SUBMITTED IN
FULFILMENT FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Introduction
Tourism has become a key sector in the world economy over the last years. It
becomes a critical source of economic growth and development in many countries.
Tourists, being the central of tourism industry, rely on their search for destinations
and travel-buying process on many sources including the Internet, newspapers,
magazines, brochures and guide books. Internet is important for tourists and tourist
agencies as it is an important promoting material for both guiding and attracting
tourists.
When translating, it is crucial that the translator is able to capture the style of
writing in the source language and render them in the writing into the target
language. It is more into copywriting, as the translator needs to come up with
topics and paragraphs in the translation that are as creative, fluent, eye-catching
and persuasive as those in the original.
According to Al-Fahad (2010:46), the translation of any promoting material
involves an adaptation of the source message to fit the culture and the linguistic
system of the target group. For tourism brochures to achieve effectiveness and
attractiveness across languages, their translation is required to live up to the
expectations, norms, tradition and thinking styles of the target group.

Background of Translation Quality Assessment

Translation assessment is traced back to the ancient time prior the linguistic
era when a translated text is evaluated using obscure concepts as the spirit and
flavor of the ST (House: 1981). The translation of Platos work by Cicero is
deemed the milestone in the history of translation. Cicero stated if I render word
for word, the result will sound uncouth, and if I compelled by necessity, alter
anything in the order of wording, I shall seem to have departed from the function
of a translator. It is obvious that Cicero prefers sense for sense approach.
A more objective assessment was proposed by Nida in his model dynamic
equivalence principle. The model is based on the premise that the response of the
ST receptor and TT audience should be the same. However, the model was
criticized as to whether there is a possibility to measure this response or not.
A functional approach was introduced by (Reiss and Vermeer 1984)
propounds that it is the Skopos or purpose of translation that determines the
quality. More often it is the translation brief which is given to the translator by the
agency commissioning the translation that determines the function in the new
environment.
.

Statement of the problem

This study attempts to underline the role of culture as well as the influence of
stylistic differences between the languages on handling English and Chinese tourist
website in translation. Therefore, the study intends to verify the assumption that
the stylistic differences in the choice of lexis, grammatical categories and textual
and contextual elements in Chinese and English translated tourist website requires
a difference in the culture and thinking styles of the target group.

Significance of the Study

Although the tourism is a key sector of economy, it seems that translation studies
covering this aspect of economic life are almost neglected in China. Parallel to the
idea of good tourism is that of making available for foreign tourists and visitors all
kinds of promoting materials in different languages. A translation guideline taking
into account the difference in culture and thought of the target group might serve
as a good tool to help translators render tourist websites into different languages
and thus encourages more tourists for the advertised destination. The present study
which will focus on the techniques pursued by translators to render tourist websites
from Chinese into English and vice versa, claims to come up with a style guide for
more effective translated English and Chinese tourist websites.

Objective of the Study

The thesis aims to analyze a random samples of tourist websites. The primary
objective of the thesis is to examine the choices made by the translators in terms of
the metafunctional modes of meaning. In other words, what are the various degrees
of translation shifts that took place in the translated texts. These translation shifts
may involve choices within the same metafunctions in the source and target
languages (e.g. textual). In other cases, the choices made in the source language are
changed in the target language; for example textual choices in the source language
text would be recreated by logical choices in the target language. By carrying out
this analysis to find out where translators have remained within the same
metafunctional mode of meaning or have crossed over from a metafunction to
another, there is a possibility to have a better understanding of the strategies
employed by the translators in this genre (e.g. tourism) to translate the texts.

Research Questions
The thesis will attempt to answer the following questions:
1) What are the common translation shifts in the target language texts? Are there
favoured directions of shift?
2) To what extent are choices made within the same metafunction?
3) To what extent choices entail a shift from one metafunction to another?

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