A Study Of Public Notice Translation In View Of Communication Theory

Public notice or a public sign is a kind of pragmatic writing, commonly seen on public occasions, which calls for people's decent behavior or attention. Stylistically speaking, it is substantial in content, flexible in form, unique in style, remarkable in conception, explicit in meaning, concise in language and short in writing space. Its main functions involve notice, instruction and regulation in terms of symbols, signs, words and images related with such realms as daily life, environment and production, etc. On the whole, it plays an important role in building a harmonious society by regulating social behavior, adjusting intercommunication, improving production efficiency and optimizing living quality.Unfortunately, mechanical translation, Chinglish and other translation failures still exist in public notice translation, especially Chinese-English version at present, which causes misunderstanding and even silly jokes. Meanwhile, theoretical and strategic approaches now available to the study of public notice translation are not thorough enough to explain the essential cause leading to these translation errors. In connection with this, the author of this thesis figures out that a public notice translator should bear the goal-orientedness and nature of public notice translation in mind, i.e. to translate public notice is to make the intercommunication in bilingual conditions more convenient and the information participation under the circumstance of globalization easier. To be more exact, the target audience can not only know the meaning and function of public notice in the target environment through the translation of public notice translators or other relative researchers, but also recognize, accept and respect pleasantly the cultural background, interpersonal relationship and social standard reflected in the public notice translation. This is exactly the essence of an inter-lingual communication.According to the junction, this thesis takes communication theory as a basic framework of the present study, treats public notice translation practice as a case of cross-cultural intercommunication event and makes an analysis of communicative property of public notice translation with beneficial help of communication models developed from communication theory. Through the communicative analysis of essential elements (communicating content/to send what, communicating context/in what condition and communicating target/to whom) in the process of public notice translation, this thesis points out that the ignorance of the relationship of intentions between a public notice sender and target receptors suppressed by different cultural backgrounds and situations is the essential reason that leads to translation failures or errors (take C-E translation for example). In that case, this thesis holds that dynamic balance between intentions of a source sender, a public notice translator and a target receptor can guarantee the effectiveness of public notice translation. The relationship of intentions mentioned above is embodied by equivalent functions and goals of public notice in form of different language expressions, representation of linguistic features of source language in the target environment, situational adequacy of public notice translation compared with the settlement of the source text and identical response of target receptors to the translated version compared with the one to the source text. As a result, this thesis deems that functional equivalence, target identicalness and situational adequacy are essential principles and criteria for public notice translators to comply with and adhere to during public notice translation. In the hope of realizing the standard above-mentioned, this thesis also takes C-E public notice translations in form of texts as examples and provides corresponding strategic explanations with the help of existing translation approaches, so as to discuss constructive suggestions and profound countermeasures for the improvement of the quality of public notice translation and the elimination of common translation errors in a rational and profound way.