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Bilingual Public Sign Translation Of Public Signs Essay

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LTCS6000 – Research Proposal
Introduction
Literal translation means that the translation is done word-for-word from the source language to the target language. In China, bilingual public signs can be seen everywhere to show our welcome to foreigners and our opening up policy. For some reasons, literal translation is widely used in bilingual public signs. However, as literal translation is just translating text word by word without considering the whole phrase or context, it often makes mistakes especially when there are idioms in source text. Unwanted literal translation is considered as an opposite to idiomatic translation (Arffman, 2012) Therefore, improper literal translation from Chinese to English on public signs often makes the signs quite difficult to understand for non-Chinese speakers.
Liu (2013) did research on the Chinese-English public sign translation based on the study of public sign translation of Qingdao. Hu (2016) also analyzed indirect translation of bilingual public sign in his article. Guo (2012) focused on translation error of public signs based on the view of international status of China. My research is inspired by those former researches. However, it seems there is no research specially focused on the limitation of literal translation in translating bilingual public sign.
The proposed study aims to fill this gap in the related research. I will focus on literal translation in Chinese-English public sign. I will collect data of public sign from several

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