Error Analysis On The Translation Of Public Signs From Perspective Of Relevance And Adaptation Theories

Public signs are necessary tools for communication, which are used throughout the world but are often misunderstood because of language, societal and cultural differences,or mistranslation. Here we call mistranslation in public signs as public sign errors. A public sign error refers to the selection of words or pictures which are supposed to confer important information to the public in a brief form but fails to accurately do so. Actually, the communicators'intention should be maintained in all public signs, bearing in mind the global audience in particular. We examined through observation and via the administration of a questionnaire on various public signs in Changchun and its environments in an endevour to evaluate the application of the relevance and adaptation theory in public sign translation. 27.08% of public signs were identified as containing errors by foreign respondents at a frequency of 45.83%. Only 8.02% of the signs had misspelling but 72.92% of the respondents found it difficult to interpret the meaning of the public signs. 37.50% of the respondents perceived that the Chinese translators had poor mastery of English language although 53.67% of the respondents could clearly see the effort of the Chinese translators trying to reach a foreign audience. We have explained the possible motivation based on the relevance and adaptation principles and illustrated their application to a variety of pragmatic problems.We conclude that although great efforts have been made to make up for error in public signs in China, and they have tried to align themselves to the relevance-adaptation theory phenomenon, there is still a wide deviation from the norm. Hence we suggest a worldwide promotion of production and understanding of public signs to avoid errors and misinterpretation of these essential components for the smooth running of the society.