Chinese-English Translation of Museum Public Signs within the Comprehension-Expression-Adaptation Framework: A Qualitative Case Study

Abstract

Museum public signs mediate historical and cultural information for linguistically diverse audiences, and their translation requires both source-text accuracy and target-language accessibility. This qualitative case study applies Li Changshuan’s Comprehension-Expression-Adaptation (CEA) framework to nine Chinese-English bilingual exhibition-text pairs from the Nanning Museum of Urban Construction. The corpus comprises 43 photographs of bilingual signs collected during an on-site visit. Of the corresponding English translations, six exhibited comprehension-level problems, five expression-level problems, and three adaptation-level problems, while the remaining twenty-nine showed no noticeable problems. Comparative textual analysis was used to identify source-target discrepancies and to classify each case according to the CEA dimension that best represented the dominant problem, while recognising that individual examples may involve more than one dimension. The cases illustrate three recurring types of difficulty within the selected data: semantic misinterpretation and information loss at the comprehension level; grammatical, collocational, lexical, and tense-related problems at the expression level; and insufficient or inappropriate mediation of culture-specific and historical-institutional terms at the adaptation level. Revised translations are proposed for each case. On the basis of the case analysis and current museum-translation scholarship, the study recommends systematic verification of historical meaning and terminology, idiomatic target-language editing, and audience-oriented adaptation through selective explanation, transliteration, or reformulation where needed. Because the analysis is based on nine selected text pairs from a single museum, the findings are illustrative rather than estimates of the prevalence of particular error types. The study provides a focused application of the CEA framework to museum exhibition discourse and offers practical considerations for Chinese-English museum-text revision.