A Research On Chinese-English Translation Of Medical Public Signs From The Perspective Of Text Typology

With the deepening of globalization, the relationship between China and the word becomes much closer. English public sign, which is widely used in daily life, has an extremely important role for the foreign tourists and residents. At the same time, it is also gradually recognized as a significant symbol of internationalization and civilization in a city. Over the last decade, many scholars have done a lot of research on the Chinese-English translation of public signs and put forward valuable opinions on the translation methods as well as existing problems. However, the present research has some limitations. On the one hand, these research focused on the public signs of tourism, transportation, hotels and other areas, seldom involving the medical public signs; on the other hand, among the research on medical public signs, scholars just devoted to the error correction towards to the translation samples collected in a city and seldom put forward a set of translation principles and methods for reference.Therefore, the thesis discusses and analyzes the Chinese-English translation of medical public signs in the perspective of text typology to further standardize medical bilingual public signs. The thesis adopts qualitative and quantity analysis method. The research data including 1245 public signs were collected by the author from the medical institutions of Jingzhou, Yichang and Wuhan.Firstly, the collected medical public signs are sorted out and divided into five categories from the contents:directory, advertisement or propaganda and education, notice, spiritual civilization and safety tips, by which the author has a basic understanding of medical public signs. On the basis of five categories, the author further classifies these samples into three text types according to the text typology and then summarizes the language features and communication functions of each type:1) Informative text (directory and introduction signs) usually uses precise, concise, standard, professional, consistent and authoritative words to provide information and deepen the comprehension; 2) Operative text (cautions signs and suggestions) is often dynamic with verbs and expressed with imperative sentence as well as graphics sometimes to prompt or restrict reader’s behavior; 3) Compound text (slogans) always has strong emotion with aesthetic and cultural characteristics to express emotion or appeal readers to take some action.Then the author estimates the collected English public signs by judging if they have kept the language features and communication functions. The result indicates that comparing with the bilingual public signs of other areas the present medical bilingual public signs still need to be attached great importance:1) The translation of informative text are always redundant and nonstandard, which usually fail to provide valid information; 2) For the operative text, translators are easy to use inappropriate tone and words or confusing expressions to lower the acceptability; 3) Because of the complex sentence structure and strong emotion inside, translation problems of compound text are mainly caused due to grammar mistakes and culture differences.Finally, the author puts forward a set of translation principles and methods. Translators should abide by four principles:normativeness, conciseness, consistency and functionality. As for the translation methods, translators can adopt borrowing and reconstruction.The thesis is composed of six chapters. Chapter One introduces the background, purpose, significance and structure of the thesis. Chapter Two reviews the related research on the Chinese-English translation of public signs at home as well as the research in the medical field. The limitations of previous studies have also been pointed out and the text typology is proved to be suitable for the research, which lead to the research perspective of the thesis. Chapter Three describes the research methodology, including research questions and methods. Besides, collected samples are classified. Chapter Four is about samples analysis, in which the language features, communication functions as well as translation problems are illustrated. Chapter Five is concerned with discussion results of translation principles and methods. Chapter Six is the conclusion part in which the major findings, limitations of the research are summarized and suggestions for further research are also put forth.