Culture In Chinese And English Idioms And Their Translation

Edward Burnett Tylor, a British social anthropologist, said in his Primitive Culture (1871), “Culture is a kind of complexity. It includes knowledge, belief, art, moral, law, custom and some habits formed by living in a certain society…”thus we can find that culture covers a wide area, it is a complex system. And language, as a part of culture, reflects a colorful national culture.

Mr. Zhu Guang-qian said in his About Translation, “In the foreign culture, the most difficult thing to understand and translate is the associate meaning…” “It has special atmosphere of sense, and it is profound and delicate. We cannot find them in the dictionary,

Idioms carry and reflect culture. The differences in the culture can be an obstacle in understanding the foreign language. Due to linguistic and cultural diversity, exact equivalence is no easy to achieve, especially in the translation of idioms, since they are heavily culture-laden.

Idiom translations and the efficient approaches

With regard to the standard of the translation, many famous translators of the Chinese and from the foreign countries have put forward various opinions. Yan Fu gives the ideas about “fidelity, fluency and elegance”, Fu Lei thinks that translation should pay more attention to the spirit than to the form, Zhang Pei-ji believes “accurate and fluent”, and Qu Qiu-bai supports the opinion of “equal option”. The famous American translation theorist Eugene A. Nidar believes “functional equivalence” or “dynamic equivalence”. Although these standards have diverse points, they share the similar central meaning, which is to express the original meaning of the source language well.

In order to understand people’s way of thin

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