A Study On Pragmatic Failures And Strategies In English Translation Of Chinese Public Signs

With the deepening of the reform and opening policy, China gets more and more influence all over the world and the connections among the other countries become more and more frequent as well. As a result of this, China’s international images draw more attention which, in one respect, is embodied in the construction of the images of the cities. Recently, more and more cities employ bilingual public signs to show the levels of modernization and international development of them. Thereby, English translation of Chinese public signs arouses more and more concern in the academic circles.At present, studies of C-E translation of public signs in our country are booming and the research findings emerge endlessly, which contributes a lot to the popularization of the bilingual public signs. However, due to the peculiar text types and the functions of the public signs, C-E translation of public signs is still faced with great difficulties and challenges. Future studies of C-E translation of public signs are still not enough and the translation skills need improving. Besides, large amount of pragmatic failures appear in the course of C-E translation of public signs. All of these add great troubles to the appropriate use of the bilingual public signs.This dissertation, on the basis of Thomas’(1983) pragmatic failure theory and its analysis principles, conducts quantitative study and qualitative study on more than1000pieces of public signs collected in Chengdu, Kaifeng and the peripheral areas of them and finds out that over70percent of the problems in C-E translation of public signs originate from pragmatic failure, of which pragmalinguistic failure and sociopragmatic failure take nearly the same portion. What’s more, this study also deals with the results and works out that in C-E translation of public signs pragmalinguistic failures are mainly caused by negative pragmatic transfer of the mother tongue. And the ignorance of the associative meanings, inappropriate mood and tone, culture default, and so on in the procedure of translation are the major causes of sociopragmatic failures in C-E translation of public signs.In view of the above, to reduce the pragmatic failures in C-E translation of public signs, this dissertation, based on Newmark’s theories of semantic translation and communicative translation and Liu Miqing’s concept of aesthetic translation, employs a large number of standard fine and accurate bilingual public signs as examples and proposes some specific translation strategies like simplification, loan, conversion, imitating, creation, and so on, with the expectation that these translation strategies can offer some practical and effective help to the English translation of Chinese public signs. Furthermore, from the managerial aspect the dissertation claims that some specialized translation organizations and websites for bilingual public signs should be established and corresponding supervision system should be built up as well, so as to ensure that the pragmatic failures in C-E translation of public signs can be eliminated completely.