Signs are the most frequent used and contacted interpreting media by the tourists, and thus play important role in the interpreting service system. Past researches on this issue has been devoted on the tourists demand for interpreting service and the planning and design of interpreting service system, relatively less attention has been devoted on the discussion of interpreting sings in terms of its attractiveness, tourist?s willing to use and tourist perceived benefit. Based on relative literatures, this study proposed a structural framework for the explanation of the relationship among interpreting sings attraction, the tourist?s willing to use, and the tourist?s perceived benefits. The sun-moon lake national scenic site was selected as target for empirical study, and 291 tourists were successfully interviewed by questionnaires. The structural framework proposed in this study was empirical estimated both by Structural Equation Model (SEM) and Linear Regression Model.
The results from SEM indicated that the interpreting sings attractions has positive influence on the tourist?s willing to use, the path coefficient is 0.69. The tourist?s willing to use the interpreting sings also has positive influence on the tourist perceived benefits with the path coefficient 0.23. The results also indicated that sign?s attraction has directly positive influence on the tourist perceived benefits with path coefficient 0.68. Besides, some interesting results were also found from the linear regression models as follows: (1) except for the sign?s attractiveness, the tourist willing to use the interpreting signs were also influenced by the tourist?s age, length of stay and travel information sources. (2) the tourist perceived benefits of using sings were mainly affected by the sign?s attractiveness and the tourist?s willing to use, the tourist?s characteristics were found to have little effects on it.
