A Study On Chinese-English Translation Of Public Signs In Three Cities Of Xinjiang From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

As a language of external publicity, Chinese and English bilingual public signsmark the level of a city’s development and the degree of its opening to the outsideworld. The quality of public signs translation directly influences a city’s image anddevelopment. In Xinjiang, the place that Silk Road must pass, Chinese to English(C-E) public signs translation shows significant importance in molding China’simage and spreading of Xinjiang’s multiethnic culture. The multiethnic culture in thethree cities: the capital city—Urumqi, the ancient city—Kashgar and the touristcity—Turpan seems to be much more concentrating and obvious. However, C-Epublic signs translation in these cities is problematic, causing negative effect inXinjiang’s image and spreading of the multiethnic culture, which is worth studying,therefore.Skopos theory proposed by Vermeer holds that translating is a purposefulactivity, and “the end justifies the means”(Reiss and Vermeer,1984). It holds threerules for translation: Skopos rule, coherence rule and fidelity rule, and the three ruleswork together as a whole while translating process. The aim of public signs is toprovide information for the public, or to direct, prompt, restrict or compel the public,except for which English public signs in China also carry the function of spreadingculture. As a kind of applied translation, C-E public signs translation differs fromliterary translation, for the former puts more highlights on its function. Skopos theoryis quite meaningful in guiding the researches on public signs translation.In the background of Xinjiang multiculture, the present study attempts to makea research on C-E public signs translation in the three cities with great characteristics(Kashgar, Turpan and Urumqi) from the perspective of Skopos theory. It aims atdisplaying the current situation of Xinjiang C-E public signs translation through thiscase study, which is of certain originality and practical value. After a review of thebasic points in Skopos theory and public signs, integrating Nord’s classification oftranslation errors with data collected from the three cities, the author found: there arelots of problems in Xinjiang’s public signs translation; public signs translation errorsare categorized into three types—linguistic translation error, pragmatic translationerror and cultural translation error, each with subtypes, among which linguistictranslation error has the largest proportion; what’s more, it is common to see publicsigns with more than one translation error. The author also found that all the threerules of Skopos theory were not obeyed of varying degree in translation. Therefore, all these result in the nonstandardization of public signs in the three cities, whichhinders the spreading of Xinjiang local culture. Based on the findings above, theauthor makes some academic reflections on public signs translation frommicroscopic and macroscopic angles, which might be a help for the public signstranslation in a multicultural area.