The Village Tourism Sign
A regional council wants to attract Chinese-speaking visitors to a heritage village. The draft bilingual sign reads, in Chinese: 欢迎来到我们的古老村庄，这里有很多历史，你可以看到以前的人怎么生活。 A community consultation raises three concerns: Chinese-speaking residents say the wording sounds like a school essay; a tourism operator says it gives no reason to visit; and a historian says '以前的人怎么生活' is vague and slightly condescending. The council has budget for one round of revision and a 40-character limit per panel because of sign size.
1. Diagnose the problems with the draft and explain what each stakeholder is reacting to.
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Three distinct problems, each matching a stakeholder:
- Register (residents): 欢迎来到我们的古老村庄 plus 这里有很多历史 reads as a generic composition exercise - broad, evaluative, and lacking the concise nominal style of public signage. Chinese signage typically front-loads concrete information.
- Persuasive function (operator): the text describes but does not sell. There is no hook, no specific attraction, no call to action, so it fails the genre's purpose.
- Precision and tone (historian): 以前的人怎么生活 ('how people used to live') is vague and frames past residents as a curiosity, which can read as condescending. Specific, respectful detail (period, trade, building type) would be better.
The underlying error is treating translation as word-for-word transfer of an English draft rather than re-creation for a Chinese-reading audience and a signage genre.
2. Propose a revised approach within the 40-character limit and justify the choices.
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A workable approach is to replace the essay-style opening with a concrete hook plus one specific detail, e.g. a structure like: [name of village] + [period, e.g. 清代] + [one tangible feature, e.g. 老街/古井/商道] + a short invitation such as 欢迎参观.
Justification:
- Brevity: signage needs scannable information; 40 characters forces selection, which improves clarity.
- Specificity: naming a period and a feature replaces vague 以前的人怎么生活 with respectful, factual content the historian can defend.
- Persuasive function: a concrete feature gives the operator a reason to visit; a short invitation supplies a call to action.
- Register: nominal, information-first phrasing matches public signage rather than a school essay.
The judgement being tested is that revision is not polishing the translation - it is re-deciding what the text is for under a hard constraint.