An Analysis on the Translation of Public Signs in Wuhan

Abstract

As an important language phenomenon, public signs perform great social functions in people’s daily life. Public signs, which can be seen in public place affect us in many ways are necessary to us. With China’s development, more and more foreigners come to China for their business, tour and study. Public signs can bring convenience for their daily life; meantime, it also can help them know better about China. However, there exist many problems in the translation of public signs causing the pragmatic failure and damaging our international image. So we should pay more attention to it. Only when translation of public signs achieves the intended purpose can we say our translation is successful. This paper attempts to choose the Chinese-English translation of public signs in Wuhan as the subject of research, analyze the problems and put forward some solutions. Moreover, the SPSS is used to make a T testing of independent sample to data so as to analyze the pragmatic failure during the course of the application of translation.