On Translation Errors In Public Sings In Tourist Attractions

China is a country that has a long history of culture, and thousands of years ofdevelopment left Chinese people with rich tourist resources. A growing number of foreignershave begun to understand China through tours and public translation in tourism attractionsplays an important role in the process.This dissertation attempts to conduct research on public sign translations under theguidance of the Skopos theory, with samples of translation of public signs of touristattractions in Shandong Province.50Chinese and English public signs of research value wereselected from more than80Chinese and English signs collected by the writer through acamera. These signs are either found on the halls, kiosks, gates, bridges or tombs. Main errorsof translation are analyzed and grouped into four categories: pragmatic translation errors,cultural translation errors, language translation errors and text-specific translation errors. Afterthe analysis, the dissertation explores the causes to the problems and concludes that, first,most tourist attractions in Shandong Province are cultural attractions. The four-characteridioms are used frequently in Chinese public signs, which present difficulties in thetranslation. The second is that in order to give people the enjoyment of beauty the Chinesepublic signs in tourist attractions are from the ancient poems and celebrity stories in largenumbers and they are not easy to translate. Thirdly, the public signs are commonly declarativesentences and elliptical sentences, which, if translated literally, might be understandable butsometimes dull and unattractive to readers. In accordance with these circumstances, the authorproposes the translation methods as transliteration, interpretation, analogy, amplification,omission, rewriting and repetition. Finally the dissertation concludes that Skopos theory caneffectively guide the translations of public signs. In order to avoid the emergence of publicsigns translation errors, people should be made aware of the necessary translation methods.The major limitation of the dissertation is that the survey covers only one province and thedata may be so small that it can not give effective solutions to the problems.