Abstract Due to a long history of Chinese society treating tourism and leisure as frivolous and hedonistic, there has been inadequate attention to the presentation of the sites, especially in the cross-cultural context. This paper attempts to study the bilingual interpretations in cultural heritage attractions in China. The author selects the First Qin Emperor's Terra-cotta Warrior Museum, Xi'an Beilin Museum, and the Tang Paradise, as pilot sites to conduct the research. The research is qualitative in nature and methodologies such as field research, observations, interviews and content analysis are employed. The field research finds that there is a gap between the Chinese and English texts on the interpretive panels in terms of poor translation; the interviews find that there is a huge gap between the information provided by the museum guided tours and self-guided tours in terms of the objects' background information because the interpretive messages did not consider the international visitors' Chinese knowledge level; the text analysis finds that the English interpretive texts are book like and information is illogically organized without central a theme or message, virtually all texts are word for word translations with random errors; bilingual warning and orientation signs are obscure and culturally misleading. The bookish form of interpretation is unappealing to international visitors and the application of a mindless-mindful model to interpretation suggests that poor text book like interpretive efforts reduce tourist satisfaction. The author concludes that bilingual interpretive panels on the heritage sites failed to communicate the heritage meanings to international visitors who rely on the on-site interpretation panels. The author suggests that relevant disciplines work in collaboration to develop the theoretical framework for bilingual interpretations of cultural heritage attractions; translators for bilingual cultural heritage interpretation must be not only bilingual but also bicultural.
2010, Vol. 25 
