A Study On The Translation Standards For Transportation Public Service Signs

In order to improve customer service and to enhance international image, major transportation service providers in China, including airlines, China Railway Corporation, and metro services in major cities like Shanghai and Beijing, publish bilingual Customer Service Guides and set up a huge number of bilingual public service signs. This initiative has undoubtedly contributed to facilitating foreigners’trips in China and to some extent raised the international image of these service providers. However, observation and survey has revealed a deplorable fact that innumerable errors exist in the English versions of many service signs and service guide discourses. In addition to gross grammatical and spelling mistakes, many of the errors generally fall into the pragmatic category, including redundancy, distortion of intentions, language obscurity, ambiguity and impoliteness. This category of errors deserves greater administrative and academic attention as they have a stronger tendency to impede the communicative function of public service signs, create unexpected mental disharmony between services receivers and service providers, and may even do harm to the soft humane environment of China’s public transportation system despite its world-class facilities and high-speed efficiency.Taking the Conversational Principles, the cooperative principle and politeness principle in particular, as its theoretical framework, and based upon an analytical study of English versions of Customer Service Guides of two Chinese airlines (China Eastern and Juneyao), Harmony EUM Trains, metros and such railway transportation, this thesis aims to explore five tentative norms and standards applicable to Chinese-English translation of public service signs and discourses. In addition, a considerable amount of original English parallel texts selected from official websites of British Airlines and Euro Star are used as references in an effort to objectively assess and analyze the errors that exist in the English versions of Customer Service Guides and public service signs mentioned above.This thesis draws the conclusion that transportation public service signs and service guide discourses, though short in forms, have unique language features and serve special communication functions, that Conversational Principles might be effectively adopted as guidelines in Chinese-English translation of public service signs and service guide discourses, and that to ensure effective achievement of equivalent communicative function by the target text, Chinese-English translation of these texts should meet five norms, namely, truthfulness, convention, conciseness, intelligibility and politeness.