Improving Translation Quality: A Chinese-English Translation Study on the Profiles of Tourist Attraction in China Based on Cultural Awareness

Abstract

The bilingual profiles of tourist attraction are used ubiquitously and seen everywhere in China. Whether foreign tourists can have an accurate understanding of and keen interest in a particular tourist attraction hinges directly on the quality of translation. However, various translation studies in this area focus on meaning equivalence of language as a symbol, whose function remains at the level of linguistic symbols’ equivalence transformation. This article is mainly concerned with the profiles of tourist attraction enormously adopted in China and their cultural translation from Chinese to English as well as the improved translation output based on data analysis from the perspective of cultural awareness, in an attempt to explore a cultural translation strategy, namely, liberal translation integrated with cultural awareness. Based on examples personally gathered from Mainland China, it is found that the translation of tourist attraction profiles is mainly studied in a linguistically descriptive way, without enunciating the deep culture beneath the surface of linguistic forms. Through detailed analysis of these examples, the study also shows that using liberal translation integrated with cultural awareness in tourism translation is more explicable and intelligible to foreign tourists. The article concludes that cultural awareness must be considered in the liberal translation of tourist attraction profiles so as to communicate clearer and more accurate meaning to the target audience.