Author(s)

Chunyan Yao

School of Arts and Sciences, Shaanxi University of Science and Technology, Xi’an, China.

In the context of globalization, tourism serves as an increasingly important bridge in the mutual understanding among different countries. Tourism literatures transmit adequate information about tourist destinations with an aim to evoke readers’ interests to have a visit. Well-translated tourism texts help a lot in attracting overseas tourists. Therefore, it is of great importance to equip translators with the awareness of the major differences between Chinese and English tourism texts in order to make the targeted texts informative, acceptable and attractive to the targeted readers. The two chief differences, discourse structures and persuading approaches in particular, are explored in this essay. In terms of discourse structures, English tourism texts stress hypotaxis and develop linearly in the way of deduction, while Chinese texts emphasize parataxis and develop spirally in an inductive way. As for persuading approaches, concise and objective descriptions are common in English texts, but Chinese tourism literatures normally turn to flowery expressions and parallel structures, quotations as well as rhetoric devices to realize the vocative function.

English and Chinese Tourism Texts, Discourse Structures, Persuading Approaches, Hypotaxis and Parataxis, Deduction and Induction, Concise and Objective Expressions, Flowery Expressions, Rhetoric Devices

Yao, C. (2019) An Analysis of Differences between English and Chinese Tourism Texts. Open Journal of Modern Linguistics, 9, 153-164. doi: 10.4236/ojml.2019.93015.