Intercultural communication theory analyzes the role of different cultures in achieving successful interpersonal communication. Translating one language into another one is a typical process of intercultural communication, whose goal is to help readers understand the culture of the source language.
Names of culture-loaded tourist attractions carry with them a rich culture of the source language, and were mainly designed to convey that information to tourists. To a large degree, whether the translations of these names are good or not depends on the response of the tourists. According to intercultural communication theory, communication can be difficult when people from high context cultures communicate with others from low context cultures. China is recognized as a high context culture, while English speaking countries are usually seen as low context cultures. It is likely that even if we have translated Chinese names of culture-loaded tourist attractions into English, tourists from English speaking countries may still find it hard for them to understand those English translations, let alone to understand the Chinese culture behind those names.
This project aims to analyze dozens of collected English translations of Chinese culture-loaded tourist attractions, uncover the reasons for their failure to improve communication between English and Chinese culture, and propose a translation strategy— the form-and-meaning double duplicated strategy — to help improve Chinese-English translations of culture-loaded tourist attractions.
