Chinese-English Translation Of Public Signs Based On Reiss's Text Typology

The English translation of Chinese public signs is an important aspect of international communication, which plays s significant part in China to cultural exchange and economy cooperation. Therefore, it must be paid much attention to. Recently more and more public signs appear in public places and facilities in order to meet the requirement of urban construction and development.The author collects a large number of public signs. Then the author tentatively put public signs into four types:informative, expressive, appellative and compound public signs under the guidance of Reiss's text typology. The author tries to propose some translation principles and translation strategies. The proposed translation principles are Consistency and Standardization, Conciseness and Popularity, and Internationality. As to translation strategies, the translation of informative public signs should convey the information of the source language; the translation of appellative public signs should deliver the appellation or warning of the message sender or the writer; the translation of expressive public signs should reproduce the aesthetic feelings and artistic forms of the source language. The effect to the target language audience should be the same as that of source language; as to compound public signs, the main text function determines the translation strategies.This research is significant to the research of public signs both theoretically and practically. The research results show that it is feasible to carry out the translation research of public signs under the theory of text typology; from the aspect of translation practice, it provides a list of operative translation strategies, which can help translators to avoid the cultural and linguistic errors in the English translations of public signs to some extent.