On The C-e Translation Of Public Signs From The Perspectives Of Skopostheorie And Memetics

With the booming socio-economic development and the accelerated pace of the international and inter-regional economic communication and cooperation, bilingual public signs become more and more frequently demanded in public places. Therefore, the Chinese-English translation of public signs is of great significance. In2014, there will be large amounts of countries and international organizations confirmed to participate in the Nanjing YOG Thus the bilingual public signs in Nanjing are in urgent need to increase its number and improve its quality as well. The facilities of Nanjing Metro rank top in China, but the translation of the public signs either inside the subway station or the compartments, is much far from satisfactory. Due to uneven level of translation, as well as the lack of uniform reference standard, there exist lots of errors on the Chinese-English translation of public signs which make the foreigners feel confused. Therefore, the research on the Chinese-English translation of public signs in Nanjing Metro is of great significance to build up the international image of Nanjing, especially to host an exciting, impressive YOG as well.Over a long period of development, the functionalist translation emerged in the1970s, forming its own independent theoretical system, and no longer relied on the source-text centered linguistic theory, or even gave it up altogether. The Skopostheorie pointed out by Vermeer is the soul of functional theory. Based on action theory, he defines translation as a purposeful human activity that takes place in a given situation. He stated that any translation activity has its own purpose, on which a translation establish its own translation method. The target audiences play an important role in determining the purpose of the translation. Based on Darwinian evolutionary theory, Memetics is a new theory for interpreting cultural evolution with its core concept of "replication". Chesterman and J. Vermeer firstly introduced Memetics theory into the translation field. From the Memetics perspective, translation is one of the effective ways of memes’replication and transmission under particular circumstances, i.e. memes are safely transmitted from one culture to another.This thesis focuses on a case study on public signs translation in Nanjing Metro under the guidance of Skopostheorie and Memetics and put forward the translation problems from the perspective of linguistic level, pragmatic level, cultural level and text-specific one, so as to propose the corresponding translation strategies based on the error analysis.In this thesis, Vermeer’s Skopostheorie and Chesterman’s Memetics are joined together to provide a guidance for public sign translation. Regarded as a special meme collection, public signs are translated by means of coding source language memes and replicating them so as to be easily accepted by target language readers, which, to a large extent, proves the core concept of Skopostheorie:Skopos.From the analysis, the current translation errors mainly lie in linguistic level and pragmatic level, like misuse of pinyin, misuse of words, wrong grammar, non-uniform, misunderstanding of the source text, Chinglish, etc. Based on the translation errors, the theories of Skopostheorie and Memetics are joined together to provide a guidance for public sign translation, and meanwhile the correspondent translation strategies are also put forward from the perspective of linguistic level, pragmatic level, cultural level and text-specific one, which are borrowing standard expressions, following the fixed patterns, additions and omissions, using euphemistic words, zero translation, etc. Finally the conclusion drew from the thesis is that Vermeer’s Skopostheorie and Chesterman’s Memetics theory are inter-related and appear to be of great practical significance in the guidance of public sign translation in terms of translation methods and strategies.