A Report On The Construction Of The Translation Corpus Of Universal Public Signs In Tianjin

In recent years, corpus has been widely applied in both translation study and translation practice, especially in those which involve technical terms. Corpus can help translators improve not only their speeds in translation but also the quality of their translations. With the speeding up of China’s internationalization, there is a growing need for bilingual public signs in big cities. However, the existing bilingual public signs are not quite satisfying, some of which might cause misunderstanding in target readers and would also sully the image of our country. In the case of such situation, the construction of translation corpus of public signs is thriving in the field of language studies. The first translation corpus of universal public signs has already been built up by The Second Foreign Language Institute of Beijing. Due to the fact that different cities may have different public signs for indicating something special of this city, translation corpus of public signs of different cities should also be built. This report is an introspection of the problems found in the construction of the corpus and the translation of the public signs.This report consists of five parts:the first part gives a brief introduction to the corpus construction project; the second part states the current academic situation of corpus construction and public signs translation; the third part analyzes the characteristics of public signs from levels of word, sentence, and text and gives suggestions on its translation strategies and methods; the forth part is an exploration of the whole process of the construction, and the last part is the experience drawn from this project.In this report, public signs are classified into three kinds:name, warning, and reminder. Under the instruction of skopos theory, translators should translate different public signs according to the different skopos and their certain language features. This report also gives a detailed description of the whole construction process of the corpus.