C-E Public Sign Translation Under Functionalist Translation Theory

With the rapid development of our economy and the intensification of our reform and opening-up, China has contacted with outside world more frequently. A large number of foreigners have stayed in China, and some even settled in China. As one of the most important communication tools for China’s contact with foreigners, public signs and their translation have been attracted considerable attention recently, especially after the Beijing Olympic Games in2008. Although the study of public sign translation has got some achievement in improving its quality, it is still far from satisfactory. Many errors in Chinese-English translation of public signs are still easily found in some great events hosted by China such as Shanghai World Exposition and Guangzhou Asia Games, which have seriously affected China’s image in the world. Therefore, the author of this thesis aims at exploring the principles for C-E public sign translation and giving tentatively some her own suggestions.Based on the functionalist approach, this thesis tries to research on the public sign translation. The functionalist translation theory mainly refers to German Functionalism, which came into being in the70s in20th century in German, and the most influential theories are Katharina Reiss’s Text typology, Justa Holz-manttari’s Theory of Translation Action, Hans J. Vermeer’s Skopostheorie and Christiane Nord’s "function plus loyalty" principle. These theories share a common feature that they all study the translation from the perspective of the function of languages and texts.With the guidance of the Functional ism, this thesis resorts to the descriptive and comparative methods to discuss the principles for public sign translation in details in three chapters as follows:Chapter1makes an overview of public sign and its translation. Public signs use concise and explicit words, sentences and even pictures that are closely related to daily life so as to direct, prompt, restrict, warm, or even compel the public. They play a very important role in regulating social behavior, adjusting individual relationship, enhancing productivity and some other social aspects. And as for C-E public sign translation, nouns, verbs and verbal nouns, phrases, acronym, present tense, capitals and imperative sentences are widely used. Many scholars wrote and published papers concerned with public sign translation from the angles of pragmatics and communicative translation; there were even groups that do research on public sign in Beijing and Shanghai, etc.Chapter2deals with the highlight of functionalist translation theory. The thesis focus on Reiss’s Text Typology, Hans J. Vermeer’s Skopostheorie and Nord’s notion based on the language and functional features of public sign and its translation. Based on the language functions put forward by Karl Buhler, Reiss tried to analyze the characteristics of different types of text, thus built her translation typology. According to Reiss, texts can be classified into three types, i.e. informative texts, expressive texts and appellative texts. Based on action theory and inter-cultural communication, Vermeer built his Skopostheorie. According to this theory, translation is an action, and any translational process is determined by the purpose of the overall translation action, i.e."The end justifies the means". Nord put forwards "loyalty principle" and "translation brief. Loyalty refers to the interpersonal relationship between the translator, the source-text sender, the target-text addressees and the initiator."Loyalty limits the range of justifiable target-text functions for one particular source text and raises the need for a negotiation of the translation assignment between translators and their clients"(Nord,2001:125-126). And "Translation brief generally refers to the definition of the communicative purpose for which the translation is needed.Chapter3tries to suggest some principles in C-E public sign translation, such as to resort to domestication as its strategy based on its appellative function, to focus on the acceptability of the foreigners in China as its audience and to realize the social functions of public signs as its purpose. Along with the suggested principles, some analyses are given by the author with numerous examples.To sum up, the functionalist approach is practical and effective in guiding public sign translation, which contributes to highlighting the communicative functions of signs and solving practical problems during translational process. Sign translation and its research are of great significance, and it still has a long way to go.