5.4 Negation 11

5.5 Management strategy 12

6. Conclusion 13

Works Cited 14

1. Introduction 

Public signs have recently been popular and unique phenomena all over China, which appears in every corner of one’s life such as road signs, billboards, shop signs, slogans in public places, tourist introduction, and so on. Public signs are open, communal and accessible to everyone, designed to achieve a certain communicative purpose. Undoubtedly, they are essential in the human environment and linguistic environment of global cities and international tourist destinations. Because English is a global lingua franca in the world village, many public signs achieve their bilingualism to comply with international standards by showing both English and one of other languages. It is the guide of an area, a city even a country; to a large extent, it also reflects the humanistic quality and civilization of the city. Any ambiguity, misunderstanding and abuse of public signs can lead to negative consequences because of the significance of public signs to the public. Not only the international exchange and the image of a city or a region are affected, but also many inconveniences are brought to foreign tourists. As is the result of the deepening of Globalization and the rapid development of China, it is the responsibility of translators, as well as all other natives who work in the field of foreign languages, to purify the urban language environment and establish an open space for the effective promotion of cultural exchanges.论文网

However, China has long been one of the most complicated places in the world for westerners to find their way around because of the poor quality of English on public signs that have been translated according to Telegraph. After a decade of research, Chinese-English translation of public signs still has lots of problems to deal with, which is a long and arduous task.

This paper will attempt to present and elaborate pragmatic failures and their causes in the English part of bilingual public signs in China, and to suggest some feasible avoidance strategies for pragmatic failures in translation of Chinese public signs.

2. Literature Review   

2.1 Public signs

As an essential constituent part of social life, public signs have existed around us for a long time. The words related to signs include but are not limited to “label language”, “poster”, “logo”, “bulletin language”, “slogan”, etc. Some scholars even regard trademark, advertisement and names of shops as public signs. Public signs share the same features or characteristics with the above-mentioned words but have wider usages and applications. We can say that they cover the connotation and denotation of all these vocabularies. 

As Dai Zоngxian and Lyu Hefa (2005) mentioned in one of their works, Studies of C-E Translation of Public Signs, “public signs are signs which are shown publicly, offering a kind of warning, notification, direction, notices, instructions and other closely related literal or graphical information” (Dai and Lyu 38). On the basis of the existing definitions, we further conclude that public signs refer to the signs which are often comprised of words and pictures to provide information and behavioral norms for the public.文献综述

According to Lyu Hefa’s article Chinese-English Translation of Public Signs (2004), English public signs have the following features: abundance of nouns, frequent use of verbs and gerunds, abbreviation, local culture embedded, and capitalization.

Chinese public signs have its language characteristics. Firstly, they are comfortable to read and can give people aesthetic feeling, for they usually apply four-character expressions or parallel sentences with balanced structures and beautiful rhymes. Secondly, Chinese public signs generally employ negative expressions to convey restraint and prohibition, which are very direct, firm, and fierce and short of human interest because of the influence of hierarchy system in history. Lastly, in the course of history, China has developed her special and distinct culture, political system, moral norms, etiquette customs and some social phenomena, all of which can be found in public signs.