| Public signs are an important part of the language and cultural environment of an international city and a tourist destination. The role they play is not just to give information, but also to adorn the cities and enhance the culture tastes. With the development of China's economy and its opening up to the outside world, the international exchanges and outreach of the country have become increasingly frequent. Foreigners have a bulging interest in this land of wonder. Many of them have had the chance to witness the charm. People from abroad will of course come across a lot of signs showing directions or dos and don'ts as soon as they get off the plane. Public signs, with English versions, are meant to facilitate their stay here.However, the situation of the existing public signs translation is a mess. Mistranslation, uncorrect grammatical structures and spelling errors can be seen everywhere. Some errors have even been a joke in foreign countries. Besides these errors, the current public signs are devoid of beauty. Some can even be classified as gross. This undoubtedly ruins the image of China.To seek a solution by resorting to translation aesthetics for the public signs translation would be successful. Most domestic papers on the translation of public signs focus on the perspective of function of the public signs, which means they emphasize that the center of functional transformation must be the communicative function or goal of the source language, and pursue the consistency of function. However, in the process of translation of public signs, it is not enough that the translator just faithfully achieved the purpose of communicative function. Faithfulness is the basic standard of translation, mainly constituting the translation standard of the language and seemingly wholeness of content; while vividness which lays particular stress on aesthetics, mainly constituting the translation standards such as rhetoric, style and aesthetics, is the higher standard of translation.This thesis aims to reveal some effective approaches to tidy up the mess in the existing public signs translation into English from the perspective of translation aesthetics. Through the study of translation and aesthetics and the relationship between them, and the types, features and functions of public signs, the paper tries to break the ice between translation aesthetic and public signs. The thesis also attempts to set up criteria for the public signs translation into English from the angle of translation aesthetics, and correspondingly, problems are exposed and categorized. The whole study serves the ultimate goal of the thesis, i.e. to find remedy for the problems in translating Chinese public signs into English.This thesis consists of six parts. The beginning part of this thesis mainly introduces the motivation, objectives and significance of the research. Chapter One outlines translation aesthetics and the related theories, analyzes and reviews the origin of aesthetics both in China and in the west according to the theories. Chapter Two elaborates the public signs from the definition, classification, function and characteristics; and the beauty in Chinese public signs is proposed. In Chapter Three, the author firstly clarifies the relationship between aesthetics and the translation of public signs, proving the existence of esthetics elements in the translation of public signs, and then illustrates the aesthetic orientation in the Chinese-English translation of public signs through a lot of examples. Problems in the translation are categorized, too. Chapter Four analyzes and summarizes the efforts to reproduce aesthetic elements in the public signs translation. In the conclusion of the thesis, the author summarizes the main contents of the article, and discusses the contributions and limitations of the research. At the same time, the author urges that more people engage in the further research in this field, making the research of public signs translation and aesthetic gradually mature. |
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