An Analysis Of Errors In The Translation Of Public Signs-from The Perspective Of Functional Equivalence Theory

China has become a member of the international community, and we are actively merging into the modern world. According to Google, it is predicted that about 70,000,000 people will come to Shang Hai for the 2010 the World Expo, more than a half of whom speak English rather than Chinese. Foreign businessmen came to China to invest in various fields. They manufacture products here, and sell them to countries all over the world. They need translating public signs into English to facilitate their business activities.Public sign refers to a piece of paper, wood or metal that has writing or picture on it that gives you information, instructions, a warning, etc. We need public signs here and there, such as universities, business centers, places of interest, hospitals, factories, and roads. Public signs indicate information, and provide instructions.The author finds the translation of public signs can not transfer the original Chinese meaning, some translations being so wired, some totally wrong. A lot of translators do their jobs at will, despite all the principles which should be well followed in the process of translation.In the author's point of view, Nida's functional equivalence should be the basic principle in the translation of public signs.Functional equivalence attempts to convey the thought expressed in a source text (if necessary, at the expense of literalness, original word order, the source text's grammatical voice, etc.).The approach also represents emphasis on readability and on literal fidelity to the source text, and we can achieve good translation in sight of functional equivalence theory.This thesis consists of six chapters.In the first chapter, the author gives the basic introduction, and the background. And then, the author shows the general views of translation of public signs,such as the definitions of public signs, characteristic and categories according to different standards in the second chapter. In the third chapter, the author proposes that Nida's functional theory is a suitable theory for the translation of public signs.In the fourth chapter, based on Nida's functional theory, the author proposes the principles for the translation of public signs.There maybe four main principles for translating public signs into English. In chapter five, a lot of translation errors are analyzed in detail which are collected from some big cities in the south east of China, including linguistic errors, pragmatic errors, cultural errors and so on. The last chapter is the conclusion of all the research and makes clear that it has limitation and needs further study in the future.