It is similar with Chinese that there are many different ways to express the same meaning in English. The difference of expressing depends on different mood manner of speaking and different emotion, while the differences of which depends on the specific environment, so English translation must be considered with the specific situations and the people who you are speaking with as well as the reading psychology and emotion of the readers. For the right meaning just the first step of translation. Let’s take the prompt for example:

In the public places of China, we can see many posters, such as, “no entry”, “keep off” and “Offenders fined”… … The translation for “Forbidden” in English is “Don’t”. But the expression of “Don’t” is too directly and mannerless and is short of circumbendibus. For example, “Don’t pick the flowers”(禁止摘花),“Don’t throw something out of the train”(禁止往车窗外扔东西),“Don’t tread on the lawn”(禁止践踏草坪),“Don’t make noise”(禁止喧哗)and so on.

All of the sentences are right nor mater in the meanings nor the grammers, but the expressions are not so good that we’d better don’t translate in this way. Because “Don’t” is not a good expression way and it make the expression seems too hard to have a kindly dialogue.

The public places should be created as happy and relaxed to make people feel comfortable. So it is necessary to express the mention in a kindly way. And English itself is a language, which are used with circumbendibus. so it’s scarcely use “don’t” in the public places, such like in parks.

And usually there are two mainly ways to translate “禁止摘花” into “Keep away from the flowers , please .” or “Take care of the flowers, please.”, the meaning of these two sentences are the same, but the latter one is more kindly and makes people feel comfortable and would love to keep the rule.

“ Take care of the flowers, please.” makes people pay much attention to the duty of protecting flowers and keep a manner action. That is the result what the poster wants to make. So it is better for expressing “ Forbidden” without using “Don’t” in public places.