On The C-E Translation Of Signs: A Functionalist Approach

Bilingual signs are essential to the development of internationaltourism in China. While accurate signs greatly benefit the overseatourists, poorly translated ones only become international source ofconfusion, puzzlement and ridicule. Vast amount of examples revealthat many translation problems exist in present signs translation practicemainly due to the only guidance of linguistically oriented translationapproaches, which are source-language-oriented. Constrained by theform and structure of the source text can only lead to Chinglish,verbalization, and failure to grasp the main points. However,functionalists, represented by Reiss, Vermeer, Holz-Mantarri and Nord,hold that, the only criterion to evaluate a translation is whether theintended functions of the translated text can be achieved in the targetculture. A text is made meaningful by the receiver and for the receiver(Nord, 2001). The directing, prompting, restricting, compelling effectsof signs can be achieved only when they are well understood by the targetaudience. Thus, the author holds that a functional approach is muchmore suitable for signs translation than linguistically oriented approaches.As a cross-cultural communication, translation of signs should considerthe cultural differences between Chinese and English.The present study is attempted to handle existing problems in signs translation with the guidance of functionalist approaches, including: Is itnecessary to translate every sign? What kind of strategies andprocedures should be adopted? Can transplant strategy be applied to theC-E translation of all the signs? A transplant strategy and a four-stepmodel are suggested in Chinese-English translation of signs.As a feature of this study, the author has collected a great number ofpictures of signs. The paper, by adopting a comparative and contrastiveanalysis, discusses and analyzes how functionalist approaches are appliedto handle problems existing in C-E translation of signs from the followingthree aspects: linguistic aspects, socio-cultural aspects and ideologicalaspects.The findings of the present study reveal that functionalist approachescan facilitate C-E translation of signs in that it adopts a target-cultureorientation to forecast, avoid and handle various translation problems.Obviously, the study will contribute to the improvement of signstranslation quality, and broaden the application of functionalist translationtheory and meantime provide rich examples to support the theory.What's more, the current research also gives valuable references to thoseresearchers, teachers and students concerned in the translation.