On Chinese-English Translation Of Public Signs-From The Perspective Of Speech Act Theory

With the rapid development of its economy and the promotion of its status in the international community, China has enhanced its communication and exchanges with other countries in recent years. This has contributed greatly to strengthening Chinese people’s awareness of the trend of global integration. Consequently, Chinese people devote much more time to English learning and attach greater importance to building their cities into an international metropolis, especially after the29th Olympic Games in2008and the World Exposition in2010were held successfully in Beijing and Shanghai respectively, for which a good embodiment is the translation work of public signs into English. However, it is demonstrated that problems of various kinds detected in English versions of Chinese public signs have rendered the translation work far from being qualified, let alone to facilitate foreigners’ everyday activities and to improve the images of Chinese cities. Therefore, it is of significance to carry out researches on the very subject.Based on a review of previous studies and a reflection of the data collected, the thesis attempts to study the C-E translation of public signs from the perspective of pragmatics and draws on the Speech Act Theory as the theoretical framework. According to the Speech Act theory, saying something is in fact doing something. In other words, producing an utterance is in essence performing a speech act and the speech act itself can be seen as performing three sub-acts at the same time:locutionary act, illocutionary act and perlocutionary act. Public signs, as a distinct type of texts, are mainly characterized by their illocutionary force. Therefore, the Speech Act theory is proved to be a reasonable and feasible pragmatic theory to serve as the theoretical foundation for the study in question.The thesis concludes that doing C-E translation of public signs is in essence to achieve equivalence at three levels. At the locutionary level, the English version should be correct in grammar and appropriate in language use. At the illocutionary level, the force of both versions should be guaranteed. At the perlocutionay level, the psychological needs of the target reader and the distinctiveness of the target culture should be taken into account. Furthermore, the principles and procedures that need to be followed in the translation process are also put forward. The three principles are correctness in wording, correspondence in force and considerateness in manner. The procedures include:1) analyzing the illocutionary force and intended perlocutionary effects of the Chinese version;2) constructing the same illocutionary force and approximate perlocutionary effects in target language;3) checking the correctness of the English version in grammar and the equivalence of illocutionary force and perlocutionary effects in both versions.The study is an attempt to apply pragmatic theories into the research of public sign translation, which will add a new perspective and more theoretical support to the existing studies. In practice, the study will provide translators with some enlightenment and contribute to the improvement of the quality of Chinese public sign translation.