Abstract：In China, the provision of foreign languages alongside Chinese texts has long been an endeavour in provincial as well as central government in managing public signs, yet the quality of translation on signs is hardly perfect. Drawing upon data randomly collected from urban public signs in China, this paper examines the principles and techniques of rendering proper translations for the public sign. As established in Linguistic Inventory Typology, Chinese and English are two languages with remarkable typological differences, which need to be taken into account in translation practice. Their typological differences include at least four aspects. First, Chinese is a verby language, whereas English is a nouny language. The different prominence tendency in the two languages suggests that the verbal structures in Chinese often correspond to noun structures in English. Second, Chinese is a topic-prominent language while English is a subject-prominent language. In light of this difference, the topic-prominent structures in Chinese can be translated into other constructions in English such as subject-predicate structures, predicate-object structures and prepositional structures. Third, the coordinate structures in English, as a mighty category, are less restrictive in grammar than those in Chinese. Such English structures are thus often transformed to predicate-object structures, small clauses, or even complex sentences in Chinese expressions. Lastly, due to the fact that serial verb constructions (SVCs) in Chinese constitute a mighty category vis-à-vis their English counterparts, Chinese SVCs can be translated into some other constructions in English such as prepositional constructions and small clauses. This paper contends that these grammatical correspondences in Chinese and English derived from Linguistic Inventory Typology would be helpful for the translation practice in managing public signs.
