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Yet, in western countries, one of the major origins of simile is people’s knowledge of geography. The early British depended heavily on sea, they preferred to compare men to fish, and these similes are remained to use nowadays. The Bible is another important origin. A case in point is the simile“as ignorant as Adam”. According to the Bible, Adam is the first man created by God. He knows clearly if he eats the forbidden fruit he will be punished severely. But he cannot resist the temptation from Eve, and finally gets the punishment. When somebody is told“You are as ignorant as Adam.” It means that he is doing something that should not be done. He is asking for trouble.
Simile is the easiest figure and used most frequently by humans. As long as the communicators have its background knowledge, they can eschew misunderstanding when they come across the use of simile.
Simile mainly consists of three parts: terror, vehicle and connective. In the sentence “The sky is like a black curtain”, “the sky” is terror; “a black curtain” is vehicle; “like” is connective. In a simile format, the terror and vehicle are both in a sentence. The basic format is“terror + connective + vehicle”. Connectives are usually “like, as, as…as, so…as, as if, as though, as it were”(Li 113). They can be called the marks of similes. In a simile, terror and vehicle are totally different in essence, but similar in a certain aspect. Yet not every sentence with “like” is a simile. For example, “He looks like his father.” Here, he and his father are both humans. When someone hears this, he cannot imagine the father’s appearance except the thought that the relation of father and son can be recognized at the sight of these two persons. “Like” is used the most in a simile. Connectives are used as a bridge to link the terror and vehicle. With the help of connectives, terror and vehicle can perform their functions well .
Similes have three functions: descriptive, illuminative and illustrative. The first one is the descriptive function. Pure description of persons, things, plants, natural scenery and actions has always been the chief use to which similes have been put (Feng 172). A good descriptive simile can draw sharper pictures in the mind that could possibly be done by any other means, and with much more brevity. The second one is illuminative function. The illuminative simile tries to get deeper insight into persons, things, ideas, even problems through suggestive association; to throw light, as is were, onto what would otherwise be inconceivable to ordinary people. In this sense, it is more difficult to understand than descriptive similes, for it is not so easy sometimes to grasp this insight into persons or things, which is so important to fuller comprehension of character or situation. The third one is illustrative function. An illustrative simile is to explain abstract or complicated ideas or processes in simple, concrete image. This sort of simile is most often found in discursive writing, or in scientific, technological writing.
In short, similes can sufficiently describe what one wants to express.
2 .3 Relation Between Culture and Simile
If we want to obtain the concrete definition of cultural default, we have to clarify the concept of culture firstly. Culture is such a complicated concept as well as its concrete definition. There exist different definitions of culture based on various perspectives and factors, as there are many scholars, learners and translation theorists who have ever provide their definitions of culture.
Generally speaking, people who are living in the same social and cultural environment usually hold the same experiences and knowledge about the society .For a certain writer, his or her writing work is always directing at certain kinds of readers, who are called potential readers or intended readers. In the main, the intended readers are always from the same language background with their writer unless the written product is made mainly for translation. As we know, intentionally or unintentionally the writer usually economizes his writing work, only by keeping the major necessary points for the interpretation and communication. In most cases of writing and communication, the writer and his intended reader share the same cultural knowledge which is omitted in the verbalization of the text. This is what cultural default is .In order to make a better understanding of it, let’s learn more about the mechanism of cultural default．