C-E Translation Of Public Signs In Xi'an Hospitals From The Perspective Of Communicative Translation

With the increase of international exchanges and a growing number of foreigners coming to China,bilingual public signs are common in public service places.The correct translation of public signs can not only facilitate foreign tourists,but also stand for the city images and the degree of the globalization.However,the quality of the translation is not optimistic.Moreover,public signs are usually studied as a whole.Even if there are some researches on one specific area,most of them are focused on the areas of tourism,transportation and hotels and seldom involve the medical area.Therefore,the breadth of the research needs to be expanded and the depth needs to be strengthened.In addition,due to the lack of a unified guideline,the English versions of the same public signs are also varied.In the year 2017,the publication of the national standard eventually gives a unified standard for the translation of public signs.Therefore,it is urgent to standardize the C-E translation of public signs under its guidance.According to Newmark's translation theory,Communicative Translation is used for informative texts and vocative texts and Semantic Translation for expressive texts.Public signs fall into the informative text and vocative text,so Communicative Translation is the suitable theory to guide the public sign translation.This thesis takes bilingual public signs of nine hospitals in Xi'an as the research object and analyzes the problems with the Communicative Translation theory of Peter Newmark as the guiding theory,the national standard as the criteria,and Corpus of Contemporary American English as the assistance,based on pictures collected from these hospitals.The problems in the C-E translation are classified into six kinds and corresponding suggestions are proposed to help Xi'an hospitals solve these problems by taking targeted initiatives.At the same time,the research intends to influence other public service areas on the standardization and optimization of the translation quality of public signs.