A Research Report On The Translation Of Public Signs At Nanjing's Hub Stations

A sound language environment is indispensable for building an international city,providing standardized public signs,and creating a language and cultural landscape with both Chinese and local characteristics.As a primary medium of learning a city,public hub stations should first ensure that its English use conforms to international or national conventions and standards to further enhance public communication,international exchanges and understandings.Combined with literature review,this report systematically analyzes the current situation of the sign translation at Nanjing's hub stations by means of the online questionnaire,corpus collection on the basis of the field survey.During the process,problems are found and classified into five points,mainly linguistic error,cultural mistranslation,inconsistent translation,inconformity with standards and signs without translation.At the same time,suggested revisions are put forward according to relevant standards and guidelines.Causes of translation errors are analyzed,and solutions to improve the translation quality of public signs are proposed as well.The results show that the translation quality of public signs in hub stations of Nanjing is satisfying on the whole,but there are still problems on some occasions.On that account,how to ensure that the signs are well conveyed to passengers has become an urgent issue that needs to be addressed now.The author believes that public signs translation,as an essential part of language services,should be integrated with the crowdsourcing error correction,the cultivation of translation talents,and the execution of international and national standards to create an user-friendly language environment.In the end,given problems like breakpoints and poor convergence existing in the process of sign translation,this report proceeds from the view of products with the idea of building a multi-modal corpus and crowdsourcing-based platform,providing a one-stop solution through collaboration of cross-functional departments,hoping to make certain contributions to standardize the translation of public signs,promote harmonious social terms,and enhance international exchanges and understandings.