The Functionalist Perspective

1. Introduction

Nowadays, in China, tourism is an increasingly booming industry owing to the policy of reform and opening up, the rise of multinational corporations and the new communication technologies. When foreign tourists travel in China, their important purpose is to have a better understanding of Chinese culture, to see the beautiful scenery and the landscapes. Therefore, it is important to give the foreign tourists the right information about the Chinese culture. In recent years, many of the translated tourism materials are good works, but there still exist some problems requiring attention and consideration. The bad translation works have not only caused misinterpretation among western travelers, but have also affected the development of tourist industry and the image of China overseas in a broad sense. As Eugene A. Nida (Nida 1991: 105) pointed out, "for truly successful translating, biculturalism is even more important than bilingualism, since words only have meanings in terms of the culture in which they function." We must pay special attention to the cultural differences and take into account the specific characteristics of tour guide manuals and the special purpose of travel translation.

This thesis aims at applying functionalist theories to solve the dilemma in the translation of tourism texts. Accordingly, the most important concern in the translation process is the translation purpose, instead of the form or the translation method. That is to say, apart from translation techniques, translators must know the purpose when rendering the source language into the target language so that the version of the target language will become accurate and readily acceptable.

2. The Functionalist Approach

2.1 A brief introduction of the functionalist approach

The functionalist translation theory emerged in the 1970s in Germany and was introduced into China in the 1990s. This theory is developed by three representing figures, namely, Reiss, Hans J. Vrmeer and Christian Nord. (Vermeer 1989: 273) In this section, I will conduct a brief review of the development of the functionalist theory as well as its research and application.

2.1.1 Definition of functionalism

Functionalism means focusing on the function of texts and translation. (Nord 2001: 1) From the definition given by Nord, it can be easily seen that functional translation approaches mainly contain such approaches as Skopos theory of German school, Newmark's text typology and Nida's functional equivalence, and these theorists all study translation from the perspective of the function of language and text. (Jia Wenbo 1999: 56) All these theories are sorted together because they all from the angle of function, study translation theory and practice, though they are different in some extent. In translating