English Translation of Linguistic Signs: A Study from the Perspective of Linguistic Landscape

Beili ZHANG, Tuo XU

Abstract


To bring convenience to the life and work of the foreigners who live and/or stay in China but do not know Chinese, a large number of linguistic signs have been set up in bilingual forms at almost every corner of cities, and even towns. Those correctly and properly-translated signs are helpful, practical and informative, hence enhancing the image of the cities. However, current situations of the Chinese-English translation (C-E translation) of linguistic signs are far from being satisfactory. Some poorly or even mistakenly-translated signs often cause confuses to foreigners and may even mislead them. To some extent, it will damage cities’ images as well as China’s international image as a whole. Therefore, the author chooses to conduct a tentative research on this topic from the perspective of linguistic landscape, in the hope that it would inspire further research and provide useful references for the research and practice of C-E translation of linguistic signs in future practice.


Keywords


Linguistic signs; Chinese-English translation; Linguistic landscape; Drawbacks; Solutions

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/n

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