A Study On English Translation Of Chinese Public Signs From The Perspective Of Socio-semiotics

The 21st century belongs to China. This year, China has hosted the Olympic Games 2008, the Paralympic Games and the Seventh Asia-Europe meeting in Beijing successfully, And World Expo 2010 will be held in Shanghai, China. It makes China and other countries intercommunicate more and English becomes a part of our life. Therefore, translation studies have been given more concern, especially the translation of public signs becomes the focus of the experts and scholars who study it. But many problematic public signs exist in various forms such as the names of roads, shops, tourist literature and some other publicity materials. These problematic mistakes can be seen everywhere, even in the cities, Shenyang (co-host city for Beijing Olympic Games) and Dalian. Some mistakes are very ridiculous and greatly damage the international image of our country. So standardization of translation of public signs has become important and urgent.Public signs refer to verbal or non-verbal languages (picture or image) shown to the public, and offer directing, Prompting, restricting, and compelling information. They are playing an increasingly significant role in life. So we should make a study on the translation of public signs both in practice and in theory. In this thesis, an attempt is made to explore the nature of the translation of Public signs from the socio-semiotic perspective, aiming at establishing a socio-semiotic translation theory of Public Signs and contributing some fresh ideas to translation studies.The thesis deals with the translation of public signs from the perspective of socio-semiotics. First, the author makes a brief introduction of the socio-semiotic theory. According to socio-semiotics, translation is translating meaning which includes designative meaning, linguistic meaning and pragmatic meaning. The translation criteria from the socio-semiotic approach are"correspondence in meaning and similarity in function". Then the author makes a literature review on the research of public signs. After introducing the definition, functions and features of public signs, the author discusses how to translate different types of public signs from the perspective of socio-semiotics. Some problematic public signs appearing in Shenyang and Dalian city are analyzed, for example, misspelling, grammatical errors, lexical errors, Chinglish and some cultural problems. Last, the author put forward some methods and strategies according to the socio-semiotic approach.In conclusion, the thesis analyzes the errors and the causes of translation of public signs from socio-semiotic approach, aiming at contributing to the translation of public signs.