Translating Tourism Texts in the Light of the Skopos Theory

The present paper aims to explore the activity of translating Chinese tourism texts into English within the framework of the skopos theory, with two culture-related tourism texts in China as examples. First, the basic principles of the skopos theory are outlined, followed by discussion of their application in translating tourism texts. An attempt is then made to analyze two types of translation errors in English translations of tourism texts. They are cultural translation errors and pragmatic translation errors. The paper concludes with two approaches to solve the problems. One of the them is to enhance translators’ awareness of applying skopos to translation. Another is to enhance the translators’ bilingual abilities and ethical standards.