A parallel corpus-based investigation of vocabulary features of tourism translations

Based on a specially designed Chinese-English bilingual parallel corpus, this paper probes into the vocabulary features of translated English tourism texts. The corpus comprises texts of travel guides, tourist information and travelogues obtained from websites. The following findings are made: (a) as a full expression of simplification, one of the translation universals, translated English tourism texts are more concise than their Chinese source texts through the omission of detailed information in listings and culture-specific information in the original ; (b) translated English tourism texts are more formal and detached in tone than their Chinese original through the frequent adoption of nominalization; (c) the translated language in English tourism texts is more definitive and reassuring than that of their Chinese originals through the use of superlative form of adjectives and intensifiers; (d) translated English tourism texts create a more intimate interaction between the texts and the reader through the frequent use of second-person pronouns. This paper instantiated differences between the translated English tourism texts and the source text in Chinese by demonstrating the thematic and formal features of tourism discourse in translation, which may also raise important pedagogic implications in ways of translating tourism texts from Chinese into English.