A Study Of The Characteristics And Chinese-English Translation Of "Forbidden" Signs From Functionalist Perspective

With the increase of communications between China and other countries, English is playing a very important role in cross-cultural communications. As an important part of global communication, public signs are closely related with people's daily life. While offering convenience to foreign visitors, bilingual public signs of Chinese and English are also an important aspect of international communication. They have great significance to China's cultural exchanges and economic cooperation with other countries. However, in China today, there are still many mistakes and problems in the translation of public signs, such as nonstandard English expressions and failure in function. So it is very necessary and urgent to find the right guiding theory and effective principles and strategies for the translation of public signs.Based on functionalist translation theory and corpus-based methodology, this research is mainly involved in the study of the characteristics and translation strategies of"forbidden"signs. With the specific aim of investigating the linguistic and cultural differences between Chinese and English"forbidden"signs, the author compiled the Corpus of"Forbidden"Signs and annotated it with linguistic and cultural features for later research.The following conclusions are reached from the study: 1) The rationality and applicability of the functionalist approaches as the guideline for public signs studies are shown and proved in the thesis; 2) Chinese and English"forbidden"signs are different in both linguistic and cultural aspects: Chinese signs usually apply negative structure, verbal phrases and passive voice and emphasize collectivism, while English ones prefer affirmative structure, non-verbal phrases and passive voice and stress individualism; 3)"forbidden"signs should be translated in the principle of"functional priority"and"receptor orientation"with the strategies such as borrowing directly, translating in formula, omitting and converting viewing angles so that the translation can be appropriate and standard and achieve the function of the original sign.This research makes innovations in guiding theory, translation practice and research methodology which would broaden the horizon of other researches. Its findings would offer some implications to the further study of public signs translation.