On The Pragmatic Failures Of English Signs In Public Spots From The Perspective Of Intercultural Communication

Public sign, a cross-cultural communication carrier, plays a very important role to transfer information. Public sign is any sign that is displayed publicly to provide information of directing, prompting, restricting or compelling functions (Dai Zongxian, Lv Hefa,2005). For the importance of English signs in the process of transferring information, accurate and idiomatic English translation of public signs is of great significance. In fact, the translation of public signs is an intercultural communication activity. Intercultural communication is the interaction that occurred between people who have different culture backgrounds and with different symbolic language. The well-known linguist He Ziran firstly put forward the study of public signs translation from the perspective of intercultural communication in1997. In intercultural communication, due to the differences of cultural background, educational background, religious beliefs and different ways of thinking between communicators, understanding differences, misunderstandings and conflicts are easily produced which may have negative effects in intercultural communication. The biggest obstacle in translation of public signs was caused by the differences of cultural background. In this paper, intercultural communication theory was applied to analyze the pragmatic failures in English signs in public spots of Chengdu from the perspective of culture. The pragmatic failure theory was first proposed by Jenny Thomas in1983, Thomas notes that pragmatic failure occurs on any occasion especially in intercultural communication.Chengdu, which has the reputation of "land of abundance", has attracted a great number of foreigners to invest, travel, work and study for its unique charm for a long time. Bilingual of public signs emerged gradually in major public spots in recent years. However, public signs in English in main public spots of Chengdu city have many problems, which greatly affected its international and cultural image. Thence, the translation of public signs of Chengdu acquired attention by experts and scholars, which become a research hot topic with practical significance.The author of this paper analyzed the pragmatic failures in English translation of Chengdu city and proposed the significance of culture in the translation of public signs. This paper adopted the report about the translation of public signs in Chengdu as the corpus which was offered by related research group, classified and generalized the samples of the corpus. With the theory of intercultural communication, this paper analyzed some typical pragmatic failures in English signs in main public spots in Chengdu, based on the pragmalinguistic failures of literal interpretation and ignorance of C-E sentence structure as well as the sociapragmatic failures as unnecessary translation, neglect of culture and values and improper modal, some solutions were put forward to solve the problems in translation of public signs. For instance, to enhance the translator’s intercultural awareness and professionalism as well as the cultural communication skills to achieve the best communication result. To some extent, the present research may have an inspiration in field of the translation of public signs and the study case of Chengdu, which, moreover, can also a practical significance to improve the culture environment and international exchange environment of Chengdu.