A Sociosemiotic Approach To Translation Of Chinese Public Signs

It is well known that China has achieved great progress in many fields since the opening up and reforming. In China many political, economic and cultural activities have been performed and more will be. Beijing will host Olympic Games 2008 and Shanghai will be the host city of World Expo 2010. It goes without saying that large numbers of foreigners have lived in China and more will crowd into China with the development of China. So translation of public signs becomes a must. But many problematic public signs exist in various forms such as the names of roads, shops, tourist literature and some other publicity materials. These problematic mistakes can be seen everywhere, even in the metropolitan city, Shanghai and Beijing. Some mistakes are very ridiculous and greatly damage the international image of our country. So standardization of translation of public signs has become urgent, otherwise the situation will become disproportionate to the development.Public signs, once called placard, is generally and widely used now. Most public signs can be seen in the public places, with some words, or pictures, or both on boards. Public signs have close relation with our lives, and of course translated public signs are closely related to foreigners' lives in China. What's more, it has some great effect on the image of country. So we should give much more attention to the translation of public signs. We should explore the meanings and functions of public signs and make a thorough study on the translation of public signs so that they can provide the proper information to foreigners and serve as communicators. The aim of the thesis is to evoke more attention to the translation of public signs.The thesis deals with the translation of public signs from the perspective of sociosemiotics. The author first makes a literature review on the research of public signs. Many essays have been written since the last decade of 20th century. Beijing International Studies University opened up a website www.e-sign.info. to do some special research on the translation of public signs. A Chinese-English Dictionary on Signs is edited by Beijing International Studies University and published by the Commercial Press in 2004. Since 2004, "Woodpecker", a voluntary organization, formed by the students from Shanghai International Studies University, has been correcting some problematic English version of public signs in Shanghai.Then the author introduces the sociosemiotics theory. Translation is translating meaning which includes designative meaning, linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning. Translation is the translation of these three meanings. Translation is exchanging culture, and the understanding of the meaning cannot ignore the factors of society environment. Language is a unique system of signs. It has six functions: expressive function, information function, vocative function, aesthetic function, phatic function and metalingual function. When analyzing the functions of source text, translators should take the whole text into consideration. The translation criteria from the perspective of a sociosemiotic approach are "correspondence in meaning and similarity in function". The criteria lay emphasis on the meanings and functions of language as a communication tool. Meaning and function are two inseparable sides for translation criteria. In the following parts the author expounds the definition, functions and features of public signs, and discusses how to translate different types of public signs from the perspective of sociosemiotics. Some problematic public signs appearing in Hefei City are analyzed. The problems include misspelling, grammatical mistakes, lexical mistakes, Chinglish and some cultural problems. After analyzing the author put forward some strategies according to the sociosemiotic approach..From the analysis the thesis has reached the following conclusion: Firstly, translation of public signs should evoke more attention from the government and its people. It is not only related to the lives of foreigners in China, but also concerns with the international image of our country. Secondly, translators should improve their qualities both in language and professionalism. Translators should give attention to every word they deal with and they should have the duty to give a careful proofreading to the final version. Thirdly, translation techniques of public signs can be generalized as follows: for some public signs, we can adopt the international standard; for some public signs with Chinese characteristics, in order to convey the Chinese culture, flexible translation methods can be used ,for example, literal translation, liberal translation, transiliteral translation, or Chinese Pinyin to achieve the correspondence in meaning and similarity in function. There are no fixed ways.