【正文】 agon Cave) is surrounded by green trees. The character “吐”here means present or look, when it is translated into “spit” in English, the meaning has pletely been changed. Because “spit” often means “spitting saliva”, which gives us an unpleasant impression.Example5:(SL):舟的前方駕著一柄長舵，形如關(guān)云長的青龍偃月刀。 furthermore, the translator should strive to grasp the essence of two different cultures. According to Wang Zuoliang: A translator must be a cultured man (1984)； that is to say “Learning a language is a kind of learning the culture and the habit of the country where the language is spoken”.Culture is the core, the source and the energy of tourism’s prosperity. And it is just the cultural elements contained in tourism materials bring about big difficulties to tourism materials’ translation, since the differences in the culture of Chinese and English are inevitably reflected in the process of language translation. Language is the carrier of culture, different geographical environments, historical conditions, religious beliefs, and social customs of different countries give birth to different cultures and languages. Culture is what the society thinks about and do, in turn language is the expression of thoughts(Sapir,Edward,2002).The close relationship between culture and language are tightly associated with translation. However, translation is not merely the transformation on the linguistic surface layer, but the munication and transplant of two different cultures. “For truly successful translating, biculturalism is even more important than bilingualism, since words only have meanings in terms of the cultures in which they function.”(Nida, 2001: 82) III. Prevailing translating theoryThe main goal of translation is, no doubt, to establish a particular type of correspondence between the source text and the target text. The nature of the correspondence has been referred to “faithfulness” or “fidelity”, or more predominantly, the notion of “equivalence”. The term “equivalence” in translation first appeared in . Firth’s writing when she stated that “the socalled translation equivalents between two languages are never really equivalent” (Snell, 2002: 37). With the development of linguistics and the study of translation in 1960s, “translation equivalence” became the focus of study.A. Two levels of functional equivalence　　In the 1990s, Nida perfects his theory by taking the language and cultural differences into consideration. In his book Language, Culture and Translating, Nida puts functional equivalence into two levels according to the degree of adequacy: the minimal equivalence and the maximum equivalence. The definition of minimal functional equivalence is “The readers of a translated text should be able to prehend it to the point that they can conceive of how the original reader of the text must have understood and appreciated it” (Nida, 1993: 118). Anything less than this degree of equivalence should be unacceptable. The maximum functional equivalence can be stated as “The readers of a translated text should be able to understand and appreciate it in essentially the same manner as the original readers did.” The maximum level of equivalence is rarely achieved except for texts having little or no aesthetic value and involving only routine information since it requires a higher degree of languageculture correspondence.Nida’s functional equivalence theory puts emphasis on cultural factors in translation. In Nida’s view, “The most serious mistakes in translating are usually made not because of verbal inadequacy, but of wrong cultural assumptions”(Nida, 1993: 29). If regardless of the cultural differences, the receptors will find the translation requiring so many efforts to understand that they are likely to stop reading, unless they are highly motivated. Therefore, for a truly successful translating, biculturalism is even more important than bilingualism (Nida, 1993: 110). In a word, Nida’s functional equivalence theory has offered a convincing answer to the disputes over literal and free translation lasting for 200 years and gives priority to the receptor over the forms of the language.B. Receptors’ responseWhen evaluating a translation, some translation theories just concentrate on messageconveyance of the target language, neglecting the role of receptors. Their main concern is that the message in the target language should match as closely as possible the different elements in the source language. Therefore they make constant parison between the message in the source culture and the message in the target culture to determine standards of accuracy and correctness. Enlightened by the munication theory, Nida attaches great importance to the role of receptor and the relationship between receptor and message by saying that “It is essential that functional equivalence be stated primarily in terms of a parison of the way in which the original receptors understand and appreciate the text and the way in which receptors of translated text understand and appreciate the translated text” (Nida, 1993: 116) .According to Nida, the target audience for which a translation is made almost always constitutes a major factor in determining the translation procedures and the level of language to be employed. In producing a functional equivalence translation one must be constantly aware of the capacity and motivation of receptors (Jin Di amp。(TL):To its left is another rock formerly engraved with four big characters “Yun Wai Liu Chun” (Beyond clouds flow spring) written by Su Dongpo, the most versatile poet of the Northern Song Dynasty (960427)If we just use Chinese “Yun Wai Liu Chun” here, foreign tourists will not be able to know the meaning of the four characters. In addition, almost every Chinese know who Su Dongpo is, but foreigners know nothing about him. The amplification of this famous poet here works well in pensating the cultural default of target readers and helps to show the high value of th