The Problems In Chinese-English Translation Of Public Signs In Tourist Attractions And Their Translation Strategies

China has many world-famous tourism destinations. With the development and the opening-up of modern China, more and more foreigners come to China for sightseeing. Public signs are an essential part of tourism attractions which plays a very important role. But through investigation into most Chinese tourism attractions, the author finds that there are various problems in English translations of Chinese public signs. These problems restrict the development of tourism business seriously in China and also they are harmful for the image of China. Thus, it is necessary to analyze these problems and find out some translation strategies based on a kind of effective translation theory. And this is also the responsibility of academic and translation circle.Functionalism originates from German, and it provides a good theoretical guidance for translation study. This theory emphasizes translation purpose instead of the loyalty for source texts. According to this theory, translation is a kind of text which serves for the target audience in the target culture and it has a certain purpose. Any translation including public sign translation has its own purpose, but we can see that in many tourism attractions, most public sign English translations cannot achieve their purposes. This thesis tries to study and discuss public sign English translation problems and strategies based on functionalism.The thesis introduces the appearing background of functionalism by listing the main representative persons and their views of functionalism including Reiss's typology, Manttari's action theory and Vermeer's skopostheorie. These theories are not only the main concept of functionalism but also the theoretical basis of this paper. After introducing the definition, classification of public signs and the differences between Chinese and English public signs, this thesis points out some problems in public sign translations in tourism attractions. Furthermore, it puts forward some translation strategies for public signs in attractions based on functionalism. The strategies include simplicity, using international expressions, rewriting, omitting and using China-English and so on. Translators can adopt different translation strategies according to different conditions in order to make English public signs perform their functions.