A Study Of Lexis In English Translation Of Chinese Public Signs From The Perspective Of Skopos Theory

Recently, more and more foreigners come to China for the travel, study or work. The bilingual signs make their trips easy. The government issues clear guidelines on the English translation of public signs. This paper analyzes the lexical choices in the process through different translation strategies from the perspectives of German functionalist approaches.German functionalist theory provides an approach for the translation of public signs. The meaning, functional features, language styles, cultural environment and the translation strategies are all discussed. German functionalist considers the purpose as the guiding role in the process of translation. The Skopos and loyalty rule are the basic rules to determine the strategies to be documentary or instrumental. The target text receivers are the decisive factors for the effect of translation.Based on the principles of functional equivalence and loyalty rule, the English translation of the Chinese public signs is contrasted according to the text types to summarize the individual and commonness about the content. Depending on these characters, different translation strategies are used like borrowing, adapting and creating. The lexis is analyzed in the process, including the types, meanings and collocations to find out the relevance between the source text and target text. The public signs have three forms, the sentence, phrase and independent word. The declarative sentence and imperative sentence are used a lot. The language is simple to be vocative. But the Chinese signs use the antithesis and analogy to express the meaning implicitly while the English signs are straightforward with plain words.The translator first uses the communicative translation to explain the functional meaning of the source language and copy the memes. Then combined with the semantic translation, the language is reorganized with the core of lexis same to fulfill the intended functions...