A Functionalist Approach To The C-E Translation Of Public Notices And Signs

With the development of Chinese economy and the development of Chinese reforming and opening up policy, China has more connection with the outer world, and people from other countries are beginning to focus more attention on China. As the host country of the 2008 Olympic Games, China is now in the spotlight of the world. China is attractive to people in other parts of the world, and more and more people have come to China to visit, travel, work or live. In order for foreigners to know better about China and have a happy experience in China, we have considered many measures to make foreigners feel at home. One of the measures is to make bilingual public notices and signs in public places.However, the equivalent English translations of public notices and signs in China now are far from satisfactory, and inadequate translation stands out as a serious problem. There are different kinds of mistakes such as linguistic mistakes, grammar mistakes, word-for-word transitions, Chinese style English expressions, and many Chinese cultural elements are not properly rendered into English. Sometimes these English versions do not give convenience to the foreigners but cause trouble to them. And these mistakes give a stigma to the image of these Chinese cities, and even weaken China's charm in the international community.According to functionalism, which is a translation theory originated in Germany, the target text's function and purpose should be realized in the target readers; and the translator should focus on different purposes (skopos) and functions of different source texts and try to make their translation serve those purposes and functions. In light of the theory, I think that the C-E translation of public notices and signs should be target language oriented and culture oriented, and should consider from the view of the foreigners' needs. This thesis composes four parts, intending to explore and analyze the translation of public notices and signs with the functionalist approach in order to optimize the quality of C-E translation of public notices and signs in China.Chapter One, the literature review, gives us a brief introduction to the functionalisttheory. We can make out its historical development, the key concepts and criticalterms, and the functionalist approaches in translation. The main part of Chapter Oneis the functionalist approaches to translation. Functionalism is a broad term forvarious theories that approach translation in this way, and this chapter presents uswith mainly three ones: skopos theory, text-typology and "function plus loyalty".Chapter two is an explicit introduction of the public notices and signs, then from thischapter we can make clear the definition, the applied scope, the applied functions:directing, promoting, restricting, and compelling, as well as the language featuresand the text types of the public notices and signs. Chapter Three, first of all, definesthe translation problems and errors in the functionalist approach, on whose basis thetypical cases of mistaken translation problems and errors are analyzed withexamples according to three main categories: linguistic, pragmatic and cultural. Andthe causes for the various problems and errors are also explored in this chapter.Chapter Four is the focus of this thesis. First of all, based on the functionalism, Iexpound the basic rule of translating public notices and signs. Then with thefunctionalist approaches, I put forward the suggestive translation strategies, in whichsome new methods and skills are explored, hoping to improve the quality of thetranslation of public notices and signs in China.By using the functionalism approach, I study and analyze the translation of public notices and signs in order to find some new translation methods and skills. I hope this thesis will be of some help to the improvement of C-E translation of public notices and signs in China.