Abstract: With the rise of globalization, more and more foreigners flood into China. To enhance the communication, many Chinese public signs have been translated into English. Nevertheless, there are still numerous mistakes in most of the translated public signs, and as a result, they largely influence China’s image. These mistakes mostly result from people’s lack of specialized knowledge in the English language and they vary from vocabulary (spellings and the like), grammatical to sometimes even contextual. Consequently, the original functions of the public signs will to a larger extent lose their intended meanings which in turn will seriously affect the country’s image. My paper aims to provide some practical suggestions on improving translation with the help of the functionalist theory, through which, I hope that people will pay more attention to the public signs’ translation and then learn to translate by themselves accurately, especially for those who have no expertise to turn to while involved in the translation of public signs. Through it I hope that we can still keep the goals of the public signs during the process of Chinese-English translation.
Key Words: public signs, Chinese-English translation, purpose, functionalist theory.

摘  要：随着全球化的深入，越来越多的外国人涌入中国。为增强交流，一些公示语被翻译成了英文，可是这翻译过程中出现了许多错误，这极大地损害了中国的形象。而这些翻译错误主要是由于人们缺乏英语专业知识导致的。为此，我的论文以目的论功能主义为指导提出一些实际的翻译建议希望能改善公示语翻译现状，因为功能论很具操作性、方便、而且对翻译目的的实现行之有效.因此，我希望人们能够更加关注公示语的翻译并且能够独立准确地进行中英翻译，特别是对那些在无专业人士可以咨询的情况下，有公示语翻译任务的人们。通过这些，希望能够在中英翻译过程中，公示语的目的仍旧能保留下来。
关键词：公示语，中英翻译，目的，功能论

      Nowadays, the mistakes in the translation of the public signs are rather extensive and conspicuous, resulting in a great number of misunderstandings and troubles. Some people who are poor in English tend to resort to machine translation, which may produce nothing but a series of words that does not make sense. What’s more, the translation machine is usually the priority for people to choose when they need to do the translation. Nevertheless, those translation softwares on the Internet can only translate the literal meaning or just conceptual meaning of one language. In fact, the public translation is far more than that, it needs to keep Chinese’s connotative meaning, social meaning or affective meaning during the process of Chinese-English translation, among which, the key is to make the translated language equipe the same function as the original language, which can fully express the aim of it.