Abstract: Existing English translations of rail transit signs have both grammatical and pragmatic problems, the latter being more invisible and more difficult to handle.This paper, based on rail transit signs in English speaking countries (i.e., the UK, the US, Australia), explores equivalence of scale of politeness, one of the important pragmatic problems in English translation of rail transit signs in China.The paper holds that only if semantic and pragmatic equivalence is achieved, can functional equivalence be achieved in rail transit signs translation.