Abstract

As an indispensable part of people’s daily life as well as an important propaganda material, public signs have a wide range of application and we can see them spread almost all over a city. With the unprecedentedly close connections among countries all over the world and the deepening of globalization, bilingual public signs gradually enjoy great popularity and China is one of the places where this kind of popularity can be fully demonstrated. However, the current situation of the Chinese-English translation of public signs is far from being satisfactory in China. Non-standard and inappropriate translations of public signs, ranging from careless mistakes in spelling and grammar to more serious problems such as inconsistency, unreadability, can be found almost everywhere.
In this paper, the author presents those basic concepts related to public signs and expounds such language features of public signs as conciseness, pragmatic in functions, combination of letters with pictures, etc. Through the combination of public signs’ linguistic features with their Chinese-English translations, the author tentatively proposes some feasible strategies of translating public signs, such as the “three-C” principle for the Chinese-English translation of public signs, specific approaches of translating public signs like loan expression, formula application, liberal translation, etc. Besides, this thesis also proves that these strategies are quite feasible and bear certain theoretical significance as well as guiding values for the Chinese-English translation of public signs by applying them to typical mistaken translations and comparing the original with version under the direction of these strategies.

Key words: public signs; linguistic features; translation strategies

摘  要

作为人们日常生活中不可缺少的一部分，公示语几乎随处可见。公示语是重要的宣传材料，有着非常广泛的应用范围，大多分布在衣食住行等领域。当今世界各国联系空前紧密，全球化趋势进一步加深，双语公示语已经越来越普及，中国也充分地体现出了这种普及性。然而，目前中国城市公示语的汉英翻译大多存在着不少问题，除了由于粗心大意造成的拼写错误和语法错误以外，还存在不统一、晦涩难懂等问题。
本文阐明了与公示语相关的一些概念，并分析了公示语的语言特点，例如语言简洁，功能实际，图文并用等。通过将公示语的语言特点及其汉英翻译联系起来，本文试探性地提出了一些可行的公示语汉英翻译方法，例如公示语汉英翻译三原则，借译、公式套译以及意译等具体翻译方法。此外，本文选取了较多的经典译例，分析了这些译例中的不足，然后提供了改译译文，旨在通过比较来证明这些策略对公示语汉英翻译的指导意义。

关键词: 公示语；语言特点；翻译策略