In recent years, a large amount of Chinese tourist publicity has been translated into English to facilitate the intercultural communication owing to increasing flourish of China's tourist industry. In order to promote China's tourist industry successfully, the translation of tourist publicity is of vital importance, because it serves as the main channel for potential tourists to get essential information about their prospective destinations. As a common form and a practical method of translation, adaptation is employed frequently in the translation of tourist publicity, which receives distinct response from the audience and the critics because of its unequivalence nature. This thesis attempts to provide a preliminary description of adaptation adopted in the translation of tourist publicity and explore the main reasons behind the adaptive techniques on the basis of functionalist theories of translation. Examples excerpted from various sources will be compared and analyzed from two perspectives, namely the content and the style, to trace the unequvialence between source text and target text and to investigate translation strategies and methods used in the translation process. The intended finction of the source text and its realizational pattern are analyzed as well in order to have a better understanding of the purpose of the translation and the function of the target text. The analysis shows that the derivation from the source text is mainly caused by different cultural systems and linguistic features. The findings indicate that the purpose of the translation/the intended function of the target text leads to the employment of adaptive translation method and demonstrates that adaptation is an acceptable technique in the translation of tourist publicity within the framework of the functionalist theories of translation.