A Study On Translation Of Enterpirse Public Signs In Light Of Nord’s Theory

With the development of economy and the expansion of internationalexchanges in China, more and more foreigners have shown their interest in comingto China for business, tourism or education. Public signs become more and moreimportant, as well as the signs translation. Though the campaign has been started forcorrecting and standardizing translation of signs in China, the current situation ofsigns translation is still far from satisfactory. Previous researches on the Chinese-English translation of signs mainly focus on collecting datum and correcting errors,instead of working out a feasible and effective theoretical guidance on signstranslation.As enterprise public signs are especially designed for the foreign staff, thepurpose of signs translation is to ensure the target readers’ accurate and barrier-freecomprehension of the messages the source public signs convey, facilitate their work,and arouse their desires for work. Because of the special text type and distinctivelanguage style of public signs, the translators should adopt those strategies which aretarget language oriented and reader oriented to fulfill the functions of signs. Thisthesis attempts to illustrate how to apply the theory of Christiane Nord and therelevant model to the enterprise signs. During the process of signs translation, thetarget text translation will be based on the analysis of translation brief and the sourcetext, after the analysis, the translation strategies will be designed to reach thefunctions and goals of the target text. Finally, the quality of the translation will beevaluated by means of comparing the target text with the translation brief to seewhether the intended functions can be achieved or not.Based on enterprise signs as the research materials in this thesis, the first part is to briefly introduce the background, the significance and the current situation ofsigns translation; then, the theoretical preliminary will include the developmentprocess of German Functionalist Approach and Nord’s theories and model; finally,the enterprise signs translation will be conducted based on the theories of Nord. Thispaper gets the conclusion that based on the theory and model of Nord, a translationmodel for enterprise signs will be found, which can better lead the translators toconduct the translational action rather than choose the translation strategies at will.The theory and model of Nord will lead the target text to be functional in the targetsituation and loyal to the source text, thus making the enterprise signs translationmore effective.