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ON THE C-E TRANSLATION OF PUBLIC SIGNS FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF SKOPOSTHEORY by Huang Hua June, 2007 Xiaogan University Abstract With the approaching of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, regulating public signs in our cities, especially large cities, have been attractive considerable attention. Public signs are an important unit of communication and play an important role in our daily life. It is of much significance to translate public signs. However, there are a lot of problems in translation of public signs. Skopostheory brings the target text into focus, which provides us with an advisable translation theory for translating public signs in English. The paper analyses the C-E translation of public signs from the point of skopostheory in order to draw more and more attention on public signs. Functional approaches to translation, or functionalism, which grows out of Germany in the 1970s’, gets rid of the limitation of “formal equivalence” in language and defines translation as a kind of purposeful activity and is a great breakthrough from, and an important supplement to the traditional equivalence-based translation theory. Furthermore, it studies translation from a new perspective. Their basic translation theory is termed Skopostheory proposed by Vermeer. Based on the principles of this theory, the paper first discusses the functions and purposefulness of translation of language on Chinese public signs, points out that when translating the public signs, we can apply this theory to it. It also analyses public signs by using the important rules of Skopos- theory -----Skopos rule, coherence rule, fidelity rule and loyalty rule in order to reduce unnecessary errors in translation of Chinese public signs, to improve the quality of the city’s public signs, and purify the language culture, so it will make some contribution to enhance the profile of our city. Skopostheory of course has its limitations and impossible to apply the theory to all the translation of public signs. Fo