| English public signs as the simplest guide or information "carrier" are obviously essential to foreigners' traveling, studying, and doing business in China. However, the improper and nonstandard English public signs have been a pressing problem because they have defaced China's international image and have given rise to troubles and inconvenience to the foreigners in their daily life.This thesis is mainly about error analysis on English translation of public signs and strategies for improvement. Large numbers of errors in Chinese-English sign translation reveal a fact that the sign translation is far from satisfactory in China and translators need to improve their English proficiency especially in word choice, grammar and cross-cultural communication.The method of quantitative statistics and qualitative analysis was taken in the study. 1,000 items of public signs samples were chosen randomly, and all these samples came from the research papers on public signs, the author's on-the-spot observations and the following websites: www.e-signs.info and www.language. chinadaily.com.cn/ herewego/. Thus, these samples are authentic and representative. The samples chosen include road & traffic signs, institution names, visiting signs, public slogans and shopping signs.Secondly, according to Carl James's levels of errors, the errors on C-E public sign translation were also specified on three linguistic levels: the levels of substance, text, and discourse. In our study, substance errors mainly focused on misspellings. Text errors consisted of lexical errors and grammar errors, and discourse errors including coherent errors and pragmatic errors.Thirdly, from the perspective of diagnosis of errors, the errors were attributed to interlingual errors, intralingual errors and translators' or printers' carelessness respectively. As for interlingual errors, they were caused by mother tongue interference. As to intralingual errors, they were considered from two aspects:...
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