Study of the translation errors in the light of the Skopostheorie: Samples from the websites of some tourist attractions in China

More and more overseas tourists are coming to China for a visit after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and websites with relevant information will undoubtedly become their first channel to know about the desired places in China. However, they are always confused about the English translation of the scenic spots. Based on the Skopostheorie and from the perspective of purpose of translation, this paper attempts to make a detailed analysis of translation errors in the English versions on the websites of some tourist attractions in China, in comparison to their parallel texts on the websites of similar scenic spots in other parts of the world. With the help of ‘non-equivalence at culture level’ proposed by Christiane Nord, causes for errors have been found. In the light of the Skopostheorie, translation brief of websites for tourism has been defined, and errors have been classified into three categories: ‘pragmatic translation errors’, ‘cultural translation errors’, and ‘linguistic translation errors’. A number of error samples of each type have been listed and suggested versions have been given. Parallel texts have been provided as a comparison and good examples to learn from. Through this study, we may conclude that non-equivalence at culture level and word level pose great difficulty in translation, and errors will be committed if the translator is unaware of the skopos or purpose of the translation. However, these errors can be avoided if more effective and flexible strategies are adopted by the translator, such as ‘translation by cultural substitution’, ‘omission’, and ‘translation by a more general word’. This study may serve as a reference for further study on a larger and wider range of errors, and as a reference for future tourism-websites translators.