Abstract

     The translation of public has always been discussed and researched. Vinay and Dardelnet, who were the earliest researchers of public signs in the west, began to study it in1959 while origination of public signs translation in our country is in 1898. Although the scholars at home and abroad have made gratifying achievements, it still needs to be further improved in depth and breadth.

The public sign is very widely used which has a very significant influence in people’s life. Any kind of misuse and abuse will lead to bad consequence. Especially that there are many incorrect and impropriated public signs, which dose not play the role on advertising, on the contrary, resulting image of the city greatly reduced. In order to build a good image of our country, is a brook no delay task to try hard to standardize and complete the translation of public signs.

Finding out the problems in the translation of public signs at present through the research of this thesis can help us understand current situation of translation clearly. At the same time, on the basic of analyzing and summarizing the problems in translation of public signs, this paper puts forward some methods according to translation strategy hoping to standardize and complete the usage of public signs better  in order to improve our bilingual cultural environment.

Key words: public signs translation problems strategies

Contents

Abstract

摘要

Chapter 1: Introduction-5

Chapter2 Translation Problems of Public Signs-7

2.1 Inappropriate Public Signs Caused by Lack of Intercultural Awareness-8

2.1.1 Improper Tone-9

2.1.2 Improper Wording-10

2.1.3 Chinglish-12

2.2 Inappropriate Public Signs Caused by Lack of Faculty of Language-14

2.3 Nonstandard Public Signs-15

2.4 Misspelling-16

Chapter 3 Translation Strategies of Public Signs-17

3.1 Linguistic Features of Public Signs-18

3.1.1 Conciseness-18

3.1.2 Comprehensive-19

3.1.3 Consistency-19

3.2 Translating Flexibly According to the Functional Meaning of Public Signs-20

3.3 Emphasizing Cultural Differences-20

3.4 Following International Standards-21

3.5 Qualifying Translators-21

Chapter4 Conclusion-22

Bibliography-23

Acknowledgement-24