A Functionalist Approach To The C-E Translation Of Commercial Service Signs

With the deepening of China's reform and opening up, more and more signs in the cities are coupled with their English counterparts. However, the English translations of signs are far from being satisfactory as inadequate translations and mistranslations crop up, not only causing inconvenience to those foreign expatriates or students in China, but also affecting China's international image. To minimize or solve the problem mentioned, we must turn to the research of sign translation for help, whereby traditional translation theories seem increasingly inadequate. Previous studies on C-E translation of signs which largely focus on the unsystematic translation skills call for depth or theoretical analysis.This thesis, adopting methodology of Descriptive Translation Studies in the theoretical framework of German functionalism, probes into the C-E translation of commercial service signs from a new perspective. The seven parts of the thesis, which are closely related, contribute to the main idea of the thesis. The first part, the introduction to the thesis, covers the background, the rationale of the research, the sample collection as well as the research methodology; the next part outlines the theoretical framework with the discussion on the basics of functionalism; the third part defines signs and particularly focuses on a special type of signs—commercial service signs; the fourth part analyzes the C-E translation of commercial service signs from the perspective of functionalism before listing four categories of translation errors, namely linguistic translation errors, cultural translation errors, pragmatic translation errors and text-specific translation errors; in the fifth part, the author proposes some strategies with regard to translation errors; the sixth part focuses on the translation training from the perspective of functionalism; the seventh part, a brief summary of the thesis, brings forward some suggestions with regard to the limitations.In conclusion, the author hopes that her research can help improve, to some extent, the C- E translation of signs at large.