A Memetic Approach To Chinese-English Translation Of Public Signs

Public signs include street warnings and directions, tourist introductions, captions, slogans and so on. They play a very important role in individuals'daily life. Their function is to give individuals necessary informations and appeal them to obey ethic and prohibit the prejudicial actions.In the past three decades, a large number of foreigners came to China to study, work and travel. In order to make their lives in China facilitate and to help them understand and get accustomed to our country's regulations and customs, the accurate translations of public signs are becoming more and more important. They are featured as a kind of comprehensive art with narrative features and usually serve as the communication channels and means between the government or non-governmental institutions and the public. Consequently, public signs'main purpose is to promote the exchange of social information and to regulate people's social behavior. They can not achieve this unless their language and expressions are explicable and comprehensible.Above all, as an applied text, the expressions used in both Chinese and English public signs tend to be simple and concise, easy for people to read and remember. Therefore, English public signs often use refined expressions without punctuations. Most of these public signs are composed of norms, verbs, gerunds and noun phrases while articles are usually omitted.As Schaffner pointed out that both source and target text fulfill a specific function and play a specific role in their respective language communities and cultures. The source text is produced in the source culture and it functioned in that culture. Public signs are of no exception. All public signs are social products of cultural phenomena and the ideological trend of a certain age. They have three functions namely informative function, expressive function and operative function in which the operative function plays the pivotal role.With people's negligence, a large number of mistranslations have flood into our daily life. They have presented a detrimental influence upon these cities and even the whole country. In this thesis, these mistranslations are classified into three categories: performance errors, pragma-linguistic failures and socio-pragmatic failures for further analyse.Recently, as public signs translation has drawn more and more attention, many linguists have analysed it from different theoretical perspectives. Such as Functional Equivalence Theory and Skopos Theory. However, using Memetics to guide public signs translation is a new trend. Memetics is formed as a set of brand-new theories in the world of Linguistics and Culturology. It analyses how imitation produces memes and further promotes the spread of information and the development of human brains through selections. And that contributes to the replication ability of memes and consequently memes cause the formation and evolution of culture and language. According to Memetics, language itself is a kind of meme and serves as a vehicle in the transmitting process. The process for language memes'transmission between different cultures equals to the process for original memes to make effect. Although the source language and the target language are two identities, some similar pragmatic effects can be found in both languages. Consequently, the best way to make an accurate translation is to find a corresponding meme in the target language.In this thesis, the author will reveal a general law of translating the Chinese public signs into English from the view of Memetics, and to some extent, provide a memetic foundation for the widely accepted methods of"borrowing, adapting and creating."...