Chinese-English Translation Of Public Signs In Tourist Attractions: From Functionalist Approach

In recent years, a series of great events that have major influence at home andabroad have been successfully held in our country, such as Beijing Olympic Games,Shanghai World Exposition and Xi’an International Horticultural Exposition. And itencourages more groups of foreign visitors to come to our country. Thus, in order toprovide convenience to those overseas visitors, more and more cities in China arebeginning to apply bilingual public signs to every walk of life. However, the currentsituation of public signs translation is not that satisfying and all kinds of mistakesemerge in endlessly. Thus collecting and analysing the wrong translations of publicsigns and proposing effective, correct and splendid ways of translating them becomesquite urgent.According to the National Bureau of Statistics of China, in recent years, thenumber of foreign travellers to China has reached26million per year; and publicsigns in tourist attractions on one hand provide convenience to overseas visitors byproviding them with correct and necessary information, and on the other hand arousetheir interest by introducing them the specific culture of scenic spots. Thus the C-Etranslation of public signs in tourist attractions becomes quite important and deservesenough attentions. Thus this thesis will focus its attention on the C-E translation ofpublic signs in tourist attractions in China.The author will conduct an on-the-spot investigation or search on the Internetfor the major tourist attractions in Beijing, Shanghai, Xi’an, Guangzhou and collect250public signs, among which200are bilingual ones. And other50public signs arewritten only in Chinese. Through the methods of qualitative research and quantitativeresearch, the mistakes and errors occurred in the200public signs will be found outand classified as linguistic errors, cultural errors and pragmatic errors. And thereasons for the occurrence of the errors will be analysed. Then the author will makean analysis of the problems of C-E translation of public signs in the tourist attractionsunder the guidance of functionalist theory, and propose certain solutions andimprovement methods, such as borrowing directly from western countries; how to take cultural differences into consideration; how to deal with those public signs whichare hard to translate literally and so on. The author hopes to make certaincontributions to the C-E translation of public signs in the tourist attractions throughthis research. Finally, the limitations of the study and the research orientations in thefuture will also be discussed in this thesis.