A Study Of C-E Translation Of Public Signs From Reiss’ Text Typology

China has more opportunities to communicate and cooperate with other countries with the influence of deepening reform and opening-up and economic globalization. An increasing number of foreigners flood into China for traveling, working and studying. Bilingual public signs serve as the quickest way to offer much convenience to the foreigners. The Chinese-English public signs can be seen in more and more pubic places, which perform functions of directing, prompting, restricting, compelling, warning, etc. Bilingualism of public signs is of great necessity to the internationalization of big cities. Although the correction of translation errors has been on for many years, there still exist many low-level errors in the English and Chinese public signs. So the C-E translation of public signs not only concerns about what translation theory is taken as guideline or what techniques are employed to improve it, but also about how the translators treat this issue.Reiss’ text typology has been proved feasible to guide translation practice. According to Reiss(2004), all the text can be roughly classified into three types: informative text, expressive text and operative text. Under the guidance of Reiss’ text typology, the author classifies public signs into three types:informative public signs, expressive public signs and operative public signs. On the basis of this classification, corresponding translation strategies are proposed. However, strategies are too abstract to supply specific translation methods. Therefore, in hope of improving the C-E translation of public signs, the author tentatively puts forward some specific translation techniques which can be applied to the three types of public signs. Besides, some general methods are discussed to help enhance the quality of translation and purify the language environment.