Cross-cultural Pragmatic Failures In The English Versions Of Public Signs And Translation Strategies

Observation of bilingual public signs in Luoyang arouses the author great interest in probing into C-E translation of signs. Large quantities of errors in the English versions of signs, especially the more deeply-hidden pragmatic failures, exert bad influence on the city's development. C-E translation of signs has been studied by more and more researchers recently and became a hot issue since the last decade. A mass of domestic researchers direct their attention to it and get valuable achievements through researches from different linguistic theories.Guided by Jenny Thomas's theory on cross-cultural pragmatic failure, detailed analysis on the C-E translation of public signs in Luoyang is conducted. She defines"pragmatic failure"as"the inability to understand what is meant by what is said". And she divides it into pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics. According to Thomas (1983), in cross-cultural communication, pragmalinguistic failure occurs when the pragmatic force mapped by speakers on to a given utterance is systematically different from the force most frequently assigned to it by native speakers of the target language, or when speech act strategies are inappropriately transferred from one language to another. Sociopragmatic failure, according to Thomas, is caused by mismatches which arise from intercultural different expectations and assessments within the social parameters affecting linguistic choice:"size of imposition, cost/benefit, social distance and relative rights and obligation".In this study, both quantitative method and qualitative method are applied. Quantitative study is first conducted to test which error is significantly more than others among the four types of error--- error in form (spelling, capitalization, punctuation, etc), grammatical error, pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure. The result shows pragmalinguistic failure takes the first place and sociopragmatic failure takes the second. In the analysis of pragmalinguistic failure, failures are analyzed from three aspects --- vocabulary, grammar and speech act. In the analysis of sociopragmatic failure, failures are analyzed from two aspects--- the degree of politeness and the translation of Chinese culture-loaded expressions. Besides, the advised translations are provided.In the C-E translation of public signs, in order to avoid the cross-cultural pragmatic failures, pragmatic equivalence should be achieved. Based on the theoretical foundation of pragmatic translation, especially the illustration of pragmatic equivalence by He Ziran, six translation strategies of public signs are generalized with concrete examples. They are borrowing the formula of habitual English signs, converting the negative way into affirmative way, avoiding redundancy, creating with English rhetoric techniques, no translation and handling cultural factors properly.