Jenny Thomas, a linguist who pointed out in 1983 that pragmatic failure in translation means an improper way of expressing the target language, which leads to improper communication between two cultures.

Vinay and Darbelnet, two scholars who published Comparative Stylistics of French and English in 1995, hold the idea that the West academia first began to study the translation of public signs and gradually developed it into a mature field of study.

He Ziran, an editor in chief of Proceedings in Building the Social Pragmatics in 1998, discussed the Chinese-English translation and pragmatic failure of public signs from the point of pragmatics. What#8217;s more, he put forward that as a new translation theory, the pragmatics translation can be used to study pragmatics equivalence and socio-pragmatic equivalence respectively from two aspects of pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics. The pragmatic equivalence is achieved through translation on the basis of understanding the ostensive meaning and the implicit meaning of language information in the original works. The pragmalinguistics language is approximate to dynamic equivalent translation advocated by Nida, which briefly means to express content of original works by using the most appropriate and natural equivalents to achieve equivalence without sticking to original works. The sociopragmatics equivalence means an equivalent translation served for cross-culture and cross-language.

Ni Chuanbin and Liu Zhi, the authors of Markup Language Translation Principles and Case Analysis in the second column of Shanghai Journal of Translators for Science and Technology in 1998, put forward that in the process of translating public signs, it is of great significance to follow principles of ”conciseness, clarity, mild-tone, norm and humor”, which initiated the related fields in China.

In 2003, Zhao Xiaopei put forward that the reasons for translation errors of public signs can be summarized into two categories: one is the negative migration of mother language, and the other one is the lack of understanding the cultural background.

In 2007, on the basis of context theory, Huang Tian presented that in the process of special verbal communication, the translator and the reader should choose proper roles according to the language environment. The language environment reflects pragmatic acts, as well as the translation of public signs.

In 2009, Yang Yonghe discussed some problems about sociopragmatics in the translation of public signs. He analyzed some excellent and undesirable public signs from the perspective of sociopragmatics with many examples. However, a large proportion of examples sited in his article are Chinese public signs, and only a portion of it is related to the translation of public.

According to the stipulation of The Law of Language of the People#8217;s Republic of China and The Second Session of The United Nations Conference on Standardization of Place Names, the names of the people and places in China should be standardized by using roman alphabets, which provides an explicit direction for translation methods about name of places disputed for a long time. However, scholars such as Li Yuezhen(2007) and Lv Hefa(2004) consider that the stipulation can be further improved from the perspective of pragmatic communication.

Based on Peter Newmark#8217;s theory of text analysis, He Xuegeng (2006), Niu Xinsheng (2008), Liu Fagong and Xu Beijia(2008) carried out a series of research in relevant fields. After thorough analysis on the text type of public signs, He Xuegeng hold the idea that public sign is a kind of vocative text, it should focus on readers. Niu Xinsheng thought the primary task of translating public signs is to express their vocative functions, in that case, it will acquire the expected effect of public signs. In addition, Liu Fagong and Xu Beijia insisted on the principles of concise, unitive and intelligible. Although the expressions of their research result were different, the essence shared some similarities on some degree. In other words, they all agreed that the translation of public signs should follow the principle that text type decides the strategy of translation and translation should put a high value on readers.

Besides, Pi Demin (2010) put forward that the principle of contextual constraints is essencial to the development of public signs translation, which successfully combined the research on translating public signs with pragmatics together.