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Resumen: If a literary translator wishes to produce a rewarding and successful translation, his main focus should be not only on content but also on the stylistic manipulation of the text. This paper considers how overlooking the writer's stylistic varieties affects the quality of translation, rendering the story questionable. Problems related to translating the present tense within a past narrative and reported speech, drawn from Leech and Short (1981, 2004), will be discussed. The textual illustrations will be taken from Mohammed Abdul-Wali's representative collection They Die Strangers (1966) in English (2001), which was published by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. The argument is potentially helpful to the study of stylistics and translation studies as a whole.

Resumen: Translators in Singapore face the dilemma of serving the needs of a heterogeneous population in this multi-racial and multilingual city-state and have often become the "scapegoat" in the event of a controversy arising from the translation. A case in point is the heated debate triggered by a newspaper article in the Straits Times, translated from a Chinese article in Lianhe Zaobao. Drawing on two sociological notions, that is, erasure and indexing of social identity, this paper sets out to investigate whether the translator who worked in an institutional setting positioned himself in favour of an institutionally-aligned culture and ideology in order to strengthen the institutional voice. It will first review the key concepts, namely, institutional power, ideology and positioning, and their relevance to the Singapore context, and then scrutinize the source text and its two translated versions in an effort to detect any traces of cultural and ideological shifts that lead to the controversy. The paper reveals that the translator working in an institutional setting in Singapore does align himself with the authority and the erasure of translators paradoxically jeopardizes the author's social identity and ideological positioning.

Resumen: This article provides evidence for the applicability of free translation to legal texts, based on an examination of actual cases of Japanese-to-English translation of agreements and contracts in which problems arise from literal translation. The data analysis shows that pitfalls associated with literal translation are attributable to not only the difficulty of finding terminological equivalents that inevitably arises from the differences in the Japanese and American legal and cultural systems, but also to the importance of preserving the spirit of mutual trust and cooperation that is found in Japanese business transactions. It is also postulated that general linguistic and interpretive problems inherent in Japanese-to-English translation of nontechnical texts, including redundancy, ambiguity, propensity for nonspecific statements, and the lack of linguistic clues (e.g., indicators of number), have fundamental, but not well understood, implications for legal translation. The conclusions indicate the need for an integrated approach to legal translation practice that uses both literal and free translations, taking into full account the linguistic, cultural, and legal factors at work in the translation process.

Resumen: Apart from referring to a geographical or physical border, the notion of frontera has also become a metaphorical or psychological construct which represents any situation of contrast, such as belonging to two different national, cultural or linguistic communities. Latino writers in the United States live and write on the frontera. The coming together of two cultures forges a new hybrid identity which fights against essentialism and homogenization. This hybrid identity is reflected in these writers' language, a border tongue constantly switching from English to Spanish. Sandra Cisneros is one of those Latina writers who resort to code-switching as an identity hallmark. By introducing Spanish words, phrases or syntactic constructions into her English texts, Cisneros tries to evoke the feeling of inhabiting two worlds which can be conflicting and complementary at the same time. Departing from the notion of frontera, several translations of Cisneros's works are analysed, paying special attention to those aspects related to identity and language. Particularly, I focus on the Mexican Spanish, Galician and Catalan versions of The House on Mango Street, the translation of Woman Hollering Creek into Mexican Spanish, the Catalan versions of several short stories from Woman Hollering Creek and the Galician translation of Loose Woman. In all the analysed versions, the translators use strategies which reflect the border identity present in the source text, such as the resource to code-switching and typographical markers or the use of calques and other borrowings, dialectalisms, and non-standard vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar.

Resumen: Language varies depending not only on the individual speaker but also on the specific situation in which speakers find themselves. This means that the language used in a given social environment may be perfectly translatable into a different language, but the society to which this other language belongs may not recognise the situation described by the first language. This article presents some examples of cultural values which cannot be translated literally (or which, if translated literally, will convey a message not intended in the original language/culture) and reaches the condusion that, as a result of all this, there cannot be a simple answer to whether language can translate society. In some cases, it will be perfectly possible; in others, the translator will have to adopt a technique which reflects the society he or she is translating for, rather than the society described in the original text.

Resumen: In Spain, as in the rest of the non-Anglophone Western world, English-language film titles have become texts (or paratexts) of great cultural importance. The titles of the films that one may encounter in Western cinema can be considered, on the one hand ephemeral, elusive, and inconsequential. However, on the other hand, despite their clear irrelevance, film titles are considered to be the genuine contemporary cultural texts, for their continued presence in the media and for their evocative nature: an important marketing tool. Moreover, the result of what happens when film titles are translated into other languages and cultures has always intrigued the audience: this is perhaps indicative of the vast universe of translation studies. The differences between languages are palpable, not only from a linguistic point of view but also from a pragmatic, historical or cultural standpoint. In this paper, we deal with the translation of Quentin Tarantino's film titles into a number of European languages, including Spanish, Catalan, French and German. Quentin Tarantino's films are controversial, self-reflexive and have acquired a significant recognition within popular culture. Most of the typologies employed so far have revolved around the notion of 'fidelity" in the translation of film titles, and involving such strategies as literal translation, transposition, addition, etc. We wish to propose here another avenue for investigation: that of film-title translation as a complex (and globalised) rewriting phenomenon that benefits the commercial and ideological interests of the film industry.

Resumen: The reading of scientific articles reveals that references to non-scientific cultural elements are numerous in this type of texts, particularly in those published in scientific magazines. Indeed, the integration of new knowedge into existing one is only possible if the reader is able to relate new elements to his or her cultural background or daily experiences: comparisons, examples and metaphors play an important role in this process. Although some of these elements can be automatically transferred when translating into another language, others would hardly be "interpretable" by the reader of the translation, and the translator has to apply mechanisms of adaptation. In this article, my intention is to examine the different mechanisms of adaptation used in a corpus of texts published in American magazines and translated into French, to analyse.the characteristics of the segments which have been adapted and to identify the criteria that might guide the translator in bis or her choices.

Resumen: The main aim of this article is to critically analyse and systematise the debate concerning non-professional subtitling of TV series and movies in some non-English-speaking countries. Most of the studies on fansubbing deal with a specific problem, and they are based on various theoretical frameworks. This paper attempts to merge them into one coherent framework that can serve as a basis for subsequent research. The article addresses the issue of non-professional translation as a solution to the lack of official translations, but also as an alternative strategy for translating the texts of popular culture. The paper is divided into four parts. The first defines the phenomenon of fansubbing. The second shows how professional and non-professional translations differ. The following two parts, based on different national case studies, answer the questions: who are fansubbers, and what are their motivations?

Resumen: This paper investigates the possibility of translating, into English, Antara's iFakhr/i (self-exaltation), as a prominent theme in his renowned iMu'allaqa/i. The theoretical framework rests on the supposition that a literary work in general and pre-Islamic poetry in particular must be examined within its socio-cultural, spatio-temporal context as a total meaningful structure which entails the semantics and pragmatics of the text. Examining this theme in three selected translations, the analysis shows that the source text has proved that iFakhr/i (self-exaltation), as a conventional constituent of Antara's iMu'allaqa/i, presents a remarkable degree of sophistication which poses serious translation challenges. The discussion also reveals that, owing to the daunting complexity of incongruence and distance between the cultures of the two languages, the translations have only managed to maintain the textual import, but have not satisfactorily captured the socio-cultural denominations and implications, a perceptible translation erroneousness, which impeded straddling the required semantic effect and the required reader's response in the target language version. The paper draws the conclusion that the socio-cultural, spatio-temporal context can provide a broader frame of reference for analyzing, interpreting and translating the original Mu'allaqa in a completely new, contemporary setting of transmission and reception.

Resumen: More and more overseas tourists are coming to China for a visit after the 2008 Beijing Olympics, and websites with relevant information will undoubtedly become their first channel to know about the desired places in China. However, they are always confused about the English translation of the scenic spots. Based on the Skopostheorie and from the perspective of purpose of translation, this paper attempts to make a detailed analysis of translation errors in the English versions on the websites of some tourist attractions in China, in comparison to their parallel texts on the websites of similar scenic spots in other parts of the world. With the help of 'non-equivalence at culture level' proposed by Christiane Nord, causes for errors have been found. In the light of the Skopostheorie, translation brief of websites for tourism has been defined, and errors have been classified into three categories: 'pragmatic translation errors', 'cultural translation errors', and 'linguistic translation errors'. A number of error samples of each type have been listed and suggested versions have been given. Parallel texts have been provided as a comparison and good examples to learn from. Through this study, we may conclude that non-equivalence at culture level and word level pose great difficulty in translation, and errors will be committed if the translator is unaware of the skopos or purpose of the translation. However, these errors can be avoided if more effective and flexible strategies are adopted by the translator, such as 'translation by cultural substitution', 'omission', and 'translation by a more general word'. This study may serve as a reference for further study on a larger and wider range of errors, and as a reference for future tourism-websites translators.

Resumen: The Postcolonial text is a political and ideological text that is differentiable in translation. This is because of its location in the dialogic and discursive communicative exchange between former coloniser and former colonised cultures and societies. This communicative exchange takes place in the situation and condition of asymmetrical relations and relations of inequality and involves the contestation of histories, cultures, meanings, identities and representations. The functionality of the postcolonial text with its message is fixated on this dialogue and discourse; and each postcolonial text is a single statement directly and specifically responding to this dialogue and discourse in some way. This paper examines the African postcolonial text and its communicative location in the light of postcolonial theory and the possibility offered by the skopos functional theory in translation to set aside the purpose and function of the source text intended by the author. Using Chinua Achebe's texts, It would conclude that the mediatory role of the translator in the dialogic and discursive exchange between former coloniser and former colonised cultures and societies need not become interference in the application of the skopos theory.

Resumen: For political and military considerations, English has become an international language used in all aspects of life: the language of advanced science, the internet, and business communication. Both English and Arabic are two of the official languages used in the United Nations for meetings, discussions, negotiation and documentation. The above mentioned fields might be free of culture and religion because the language of science, for instance, is direct and the action is the most important element of meaning which is more important than the doer. Obviously, the same thing is applicable on the language of business or stock markets in London, New York and Dubai. But when it comes to the language of politics and mass media which processes politics, the linguistic situation becomes different due to the excessive use of cultural and religious metaphors and religious terminologies deep-rooted in most classical and modern languages like Arabic which is the language of the holy Koran followed by one billion and half people. This number is expected to rise sharply due to the high birth rate in the Muslim World as this is recommended by Islamic teachings. This means that Arabic will increasingly spoken by a large number of people worldwide. The misinterpretation of certain Arabic, political and religious terminologies results in communicative problems for politicians and journalists who could be native speakers of Arabic or English. For the purpose of investigating this communicative problem, we collected data from 10 journalists who were Arab, British and American. They were chosen randomly and asked about the terrorism connotations of frequently used Arabic terms in mass media like: islamist, martyr, strugglers, Jihad: holy war, sacrifice, Martyr operation, guerillas, etc. Those religious, political and conceptually loaded words were described, classified and codified as the most terrorism words and the most problematic words for western journalists and/or politicians. The study has revealed that they are so because they seem to represent a linguistic interface and a big aggressive concept as seen by western journalists. On top of that, they are loaded with culturally bound connotations, images and signals. On the contrary, the Arab journalists did not see these words in the way of their western colleagues did.

Resumen: Cultural transaltion in this research refers to translation of site names in the Historic Centre of Macau which was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in the year 2005. The Historic Centre of Macau, which is the product of over 400 years of cultural exchange between the western and the Chinese civilizations, encompasses rich architectural legacies. This paper attempts to examine how the names of those cultural legacies are translated.

Resumen: Songs of all types as a distinct artistic genre can be very informative means of understanding the cultural and social construct of a given society. Like poetry, especially the oral form, which heavily relies on colloquialism, as is the case within a Jordanian context, songs can bear cultural, and historical allusions, genealogy, and mythology, in some cultures to be performed on related contemporary occasions. The present study is an attempt to analyze the social, cultural and historic allusions, linguistically interwoven in national and patriotic songs to reflect a massive feeling as the content of an artistic aspect of the ordinary people's everyday life. Due to cultural and social distinctiveness, as mainly expressed in colloquial Arabic expressions, such type of songs can create gaps hard to bridge in translation. Therefore, the study tries to shed light into those problems posed in translating national songs, which are richly loaded with colloquial expressions, to a target audience.

Resumen: his paper argues that since in general, it is inadvisable for translation to disregard the possible unintelligibility of the text, a web of significance or signification must be reproduced irrespective of seemingly insurmountable translation difficulties. Interpretation is related to the issues of cultural translation and (un)translatability in cultural terms, necessitating a clutch of interpretative modes prior to the effective formulation of appropriate translation strategies. Temporal and cultural gaps tend to create difficulties in interpretation, and cultural pluralism may lead to multiple, hence different, interpretations. Principally because of translation, we have progressed into the age of multiculturalism, and it is not just that the necessity of acculturation seems to be diminishing, but there is a real desire to spurn it. Foreignization is a political issue. Accordingly, the tensions of ideological incommensurability need to be dissipated in order to facilitate cross-cultural understanding and communication. A degree of ideological pluralism permits cultural diversity distinctively marked by tolerance of difference and attempts to reduce an underlying distrust of the foreign. Multiculturalism, however, by no means denotes the demise of ideology. In spite of its ostensible theoretical naivety, intentionalism has some serious implications for the translator, who may ignore at his/her own peril, for instance, the complex ideological consciousness that informs not only the source text but also the resulting target text. If we say that both the author and the reader are responsible for context or its construction, then the translator must play the double role of reader and author in the sense of (re)constructing context. While we interpret with many aims, the act of interpretation is culturally and ideologically conditioned, and the ensuing complicated remapping is such that translation is always somewhat adrift

Resumen: Much has been said about how ideological tendencies can influence the content of a translation and the Spanish version of Prescott's work History of the Conquest of Mexico, with a Preliminary View of the Ancient Mexican Civilization, and the Life of the Conqueror, Hernando Cortés is a clear example of this influence. Manipulation was the strategy that the Mexican editorial promoted and it is what the translator yielded to, but not in a way that was expected. Focusing on the account of the episode of the conquest of Mexico in which Montezuma and his tragic death are prominent, this article will show how Navarro, the translator, meticulously respects the North American's portrayal of the Aztec ruler, whom he considers to be hypocritical, superstitious, lavish, weak and fainthearted. When Navarro does manipulate the description, it is principally in order to accentuate some negative trait of the Aztec leader which has already been presented in the original text or to prevent the Mexican reader from having to see in print the name of the emperor who was associated with incidents which many Mexicans might consider lamentable. At the same time, it will be clear that cognitive linguistics provides adequate theoretical support in order to be able to comprehend that both the original and translated texts highlight the idea of Montezuma as a metaphor and symbol of failure.

Resumen: This paper concisely reinvestigates translatorial action and observes that the 'meaning' of lexical items is not the same with the 'sense' of lexical items. The central distinctions between the two terms are that the meaning of lexical items is not only a subjective application, but is also dependent on its environment for its truth-value within any given linguistic discourse. The sense of a word however, refers to its objective use and is context independent. Meaning is viewed as having a direct link with the communicative approach to translation. The approach derives from the Communication Theory, which core assumption is that unpredictability is equivalent to informativity. Unpredictability can be unravelled by building in redundancy into the target text to avoid communication overload.pThrough a rigorous theoretical explications coupled with an avalanche of exemplifications, it is observed that communicatively generated texts appear smoother and more comprehensible than its semantic counter part. However, the writers, suggest that the communicative approach to translation is necessarily applicable in cases of use variations occasioned by differential discourse practice between the source and the target language socio-cultures. Sequel to that, use variations between languages and socio-cultures in contact often pose linguistic structures that resist semantic rendition, because it fails to recapture the ideational content of the source language text in such instances. It is the failure of the semantic approach to yield adequate text(s) at the target end that necessitates the communicative type.

Resumen: Translation as a cultural process can be used in various ways to suppress or promote ideologies. Within the framework of Critical Studies in Translation, this article examines the presence of the phenomenon of manipulation; that is, deliberate alteration of central topics and messages for ideological purposes, in the Spanish translation of the story The Happy Prince by Oscar Wilde. It proposes that Wilde's specific intent in using the fairy tale genre to battle heterosexism (the belief that heterosexuality is the only norm) is not transmitted in any of the Spanish versions of the story, since its English publication in 1888 to the twenty-first century. The analysis proves that all twelve translations of the story found, included the famous translation by Jorge Luis Borges in 1910, manipulate the sex and sexuality of the characters by taking advantage of the commonly perceived ambiguities between the grammatical and cultural gender in Spanish. This is done in such a way that one of the messages of the story, the redemption of homosexual love and its acceptance by God, is omitted entirely to become, and promote, the standard and conventional view of sexuality that dominates contemporary Western tradition. The article finishes by pointing out the linguistic choices that need to be considered for a new translation of the story and provides the translation of a passage as an example.

Resumen: The translation, dissemination and reception of knowledge has served as an excellent indicator of changing ideologies and the major catalyst for institutional changes, language reforms and social transformation in China. However, English representations of the Chinese tradition of translation (e.g. Hung 2005; Hung and Pollard 2009) have not incorporated research findings from Chinese studies (e.g. Cohen 1995; Amelung, Kurtz and Lackner 2001; Elman 2005) and tend to provide unsubstantiated generalizations and hasty conclusions. This article uses a combination of "cultural tool" (Even-Zohar 2005) and "culture planning" (Even-Zohar 2008) as a frame of reference to provide a macroscopic perspective on knowledge translation in different Chinese historical periods as "a means of planning" (Toury 2002:?166) to promote religious agendas, modernize traditional Chinese natural studies, Westernize educational and academic systems, facilitate modernization of the state or participate in global knowledge production.

Resumen: Implied meaning is not an inherent part of translation, but it is important all the same as no one says everything while speaking. Implied messages are often perceived through shared experiences. To decode and encode an implied cultural meaning calls for a thorough understanding of that culture. The translator should be able to distinguish a consciously implied meaning from an unconscious one. In the former, the locutor passes on the message indirectly but is not ready to accept responsibility for the implied meaning. In the second case, the locutor has no intention to deliberately hide his intentions behind the words. However, this can lead to intercultural communication problems. To my mind, the attitude of a translator to these implied meanings is this: be as faithful as possible to the spirit of the deliberately hidden message, but be more explicit where the implied meaning seems to have been hidden unconsciously. There is however need for caution as the translator cannot be too sure of knowing the attitude of the author all the time.

Resumen: This paper addresses the problem of linguistic and cultural differences in literary translation, and more specifically in the translation of poetry. It examines a key concept in postmodernism: "the other", and its relationship with translation studies. This study aims to investigate the translation of the "other" in literature, and how this is assimilated/domesticated or made foreign/exotic in poetic translation. In other words, it probes the translation of ppoetry of SL-culture and TL-culture orientation. Toachieve this, various versions of Arabic translation of Shakespeare's sonnet 18 "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day" are examined. An analytical comparative method is used.

Resumen: This study endeavors to explore the problems that Translation trainees' mother culture poses when translating culture-specific idioms. The study used a translation task that comprises 20 culture-specific English idioms which incorporate lexical entities that can have negative connotations in the Arabic culture. The task was distributed to 40 randomly selected translation trainees, senior undergraduate translation students at the Department of Arabic and Translation, College of Languages, Sana'a University. Findings of the study show that the trainees' mother culture had a considerable impact on the translation process. This impact exhibited itself in many forms, the most prominent of which is the tendency to offer a culturally-driven judgment of the content of the idiom instead of translating the idiom itself. The paper delineates the various forms of cultural interference as seen in the trainees' renditions of the idioms in the study.

Resumen: Scholars have extensively explored translation as product and as process, but relatively little attention has been paid to translation as a power of defence and construction. This paper proposes a modest step in this direction by conceptualizing the power of translation in the modern world of globalization in terms of the soft power theory, with particular reference to the Chinese context. With this in mind, the author argues that globalization presents both opportunities and challenges for translation as a soft power. In the face of rising fears regarding a crisis of identities and a cultural deficit intensified by globalization, the roles of translation as a "cultural filter" and a bridge for intercultural communication give it a defensive soft power. Under soft-power-oriented policies, translation not only serves as a "charm" tool for public diplomacy and nation-branding, but also contributes to an understanding of China's ideals and helps export Chinese cultural values, thereby highlighting its role as a constructive soft power.

Resumen: The case study examined in depth is a comparison analysis of the classical English novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, which has been translated into Chinese seven times, with seven versions preserving the novel form of the original. The present study will elaborate on the differences between two Chinese versions of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, one is Zhang Guruo's version translated in 1934, and the other is Sun Zhili's version translated in 1999, with regard to language style, literature, concept, acceptance of context, as well as the different translation strategies translators adopted in different historical, social and cultural contexts. The study also examines the special role played in the process by the two translations. The present paper thus contributes both to translation studies and to literary theory. The comparison is carried out by answering the following questions: - What are the social cultural impacts on the first translation and the retranslation? - What kind of selection tendencies do the two translators have? - What are the specific translation strategies adopted by the translators in the field of social customs, history and religion, literature and art, Bible and other allusions, literature and historical figures? Why?

Resumen: Translation traces embrace a wide range of inheritance forms in cultural production practices. Pseudo-originals disclose a kind of literary creation pattern which is a partial or full cross-lingual plagiarism of a text by a predecessor or a contemporary from another language-culture. Well-known quotations in a foreign language are frequently employed by speakers or writers via impromptu translating or memory-based appropriation from an available translation. These translated quotations may well be imitated by text producers to derive a large number of variations in the target culture. Plagiarisms or borrowings are also seen in retranslations of great world classics. As two largely uncharted territories, indirect translation and back translation make translation traces too weak to be located. The inheritance of translation beliefs indicates various genealogies, such as husband-wife genealogy, father-daughter genealogy and so on. Research on the origins of translative memes, their morphology and typology of transmission as well as their mutative reasons may create a new area for Translation Studies.

Resumen: This paper attempts to apply the functionalist approaches to a comparative study of the two English versions of Hongloumeng in terms of the translation of culture-specific items. The author tries to explore the important role the translation skopos and translation brief play in the choice of translation strategies and offers some comments on the legitimacy of these strategies employed. The analysis of the translation of culture-specific items is conducted in the following five subcultures: ecology, material culture, social culture, religious culture and linguistic culture. Through both a qualitative analysis and quantitative data in which 190 samples covering five cultural categories are collected randomly from the first 80 chapters, the research reveals that the two translators of Hongloumeng employ different strategies in most cases, namely, the Yangs mostly adopt foreignization in order to introduce the Chinese cultural heritage, while Hawkes employs domestication with a purpose of reaching out to the target reader.

Resumen: This paper reviews the criticism of J. P. Clark's Ijo-English translation The Ozidi Saga and observes that no adequate investigation has been made of this work from a linguistic angle. It notes that culture-bound concepts constitute a problematic area in Clark's translation as a result of the difference in the culture sub-systems between Ijo and English. Specifically, elements of Ijo culture, namely natural objects, marriage system and maternity, art and dance, kinship terms and the notion of God have been inconsistently and sometimes unfaithfully translated as a result of the adoption of free translation. This gives a confusing or inaccurate impression of certain Ijo cultural traits to the reader of the English texto The paper recommends that culture-bound concepts can hardly be represented adequately through free translation and proposes that such concepts should either be left untranslated as loan words into the target language or given literal or loan translations and then be paraphrased in glossaries or annotations.

Resumen: Cultural referents not only designate specific realities of a given culture which do not always exist in another but they are also semantic elements which trigger social representations. By conveying values and points of view about different social groups, cultural referents become linguistic instruments to build stereotypes. These thought patterns are shared by the members of a social or cultural community and act as a filter of reality. The aim of this paper is to study the role of cultural referents in the construction of social stereotypes, focusing on the socio-cognitive universe they evoke. To this end, we have analyzed the translations techniques applied in the Spanish, Catalan and English versions of a novel which has been very successful on the French literary scene: Muriel Barbery's L'Élégance du hérisson (2006). As show the results of this textual comparison, the explanations, descriptions and additional information observed in target texts do not trigger the same associations as cultural referents do in the source text. Translational approaches are too limited when it comes to achieve linguistic adequacy to different world visions. Therefore, translation must be conceived as an encounter between two cultural systems, in which the translator must build bridges, not so much between two linguistic systems as between the social perceptions and values of two different cultural communities.

Resumen: The varying sociohistorical contexts of Hong Kong which was ceded as a colony to the British in the mid-nineteenth century and returned to the Chinese in the late twentieth century have shaped different language policies, which in turn have ascribed a growing importance to the use of Chinese in society and established various normative requirements for its use accordingly. This article endeavors to show how sociohistorical factors have governed the use of Chinese in the translation of two kinds of notices, one published in The Hong Kong Government Gazette, which is aimed at giving publicity to the orders issued by the government, and the other posted in public places. Drawing on bilingual samples of these notices, it will examine how English notices conveying a similar message but written in different periods of the history of Hong Kong have been translated into Chinese and whether the translations are acceptable to the receivers of the target texts. Regarding the translation of notices from the government gazette, it will, firstly, investigate how an English notice can be modified stylistically, syntactically and lexically since the Chinese translation incorporates some conventionalized textual features of the classical language, and secondly, discuss how the classical language as the medium of translation has gradually given way to the vernacular. As for the translation of notices posted in public, it will scrutinize Chinese texts which exhibit the interfering effect of the linguistic habit of the English, meanwhile presenting some examples showing how Chinese poetic devices are employed to evoke a sense of familiarity. It will affirm by way of conclusion that there are diverse views on the way to do translation under altered sociohistorical conditions.