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2. Literature Review
Idioms are a part of cultural treasure in human civilization. They are characterized by simple language，profound meaning，dramatic image, manifold rhetorical device. However, it’s hard to achieve a good translation of idioms because of different cultural backgrounds, such as perse natural geographical environments, various social customs, perse religious beliefs, perse historical allusions, and different modes of thinking. All these different cultural backgrounds have undoubtedly made it difficult for translators to get a right comprehension. Today, in terms of reflection of cultural difference, the translation of English and Chinese Idioms is far from being satisfactory now；and it is still at a lower level. Although many scholars have made numerous studies in this field，which only focus on idioms’ certain aspects, such as origin, lexical structure, semantic characteristics , and the syntactic function ,they still haven’t do a thorough and systematic study of the factors of culture；and they also haven’t appropriately used translation skills from the perspective of cultural difference. Under these circumstances, translators should pay more attention to English and Chinese idioms translation. The thesis plans to translate English and Chinese idioms from the perspective of different cultures, and it supplies certain implications to the translation of the English and Chinese idioms.
3. The significance of idioms
Being an essential part of the language and culture of a society, idioms play an important role in interpreting the meanings of culture in different countries. At the same time, because English and Chinese idioms are closely linked to cultures and traditions, so they convey different cultural features and national characteristics. Generally speaking, idioms are expressions which are difficult to understand from the literal meanings of inpidual constituents. Idioms have two distinguishing features that respectively are semantic unity and structural stability. In its broad sense, idioms include metaphorical phrases, slang, colloquialism, proverbs, sayings, set phrases, two part allegorical sayings, and allusions and so forth. All these mean that it’s difficult to translate English and Chinese idioms well .What’s more, with the development of society, people take part in more intercultural communication than before, which makes the translation of English and Chinese idioms become more difficult and complicated to understand. With the result that it’s better to translate the idioms from the Perspective of cultural differences.
4. The factors contributing to the cultural differences of English and Chinese idioms
4.1 The factors
(1) Natural geographical environment
Natural geographical environment greatly influences the process of forming culture. In other words, natural geographic environment is the foundation of humans’ existence and development, so different nations’ cultural formation and development are greatly influenced by different geographic environments.
Natural geographical environment plays an important role in shaping one country’s culture; what’s more human beings have no choices and capacities to change the geography. Consequently, idioms based on geographical features appear different and have their own special meanings. Such as, Chinese people are accustomed to using “the east wind” to symbolize “the spring wind” while Western people “the west wind”. Just from this, we can see obvious regional difference in expressing idioms.
Being an island country, Britain has its special customs. British People live along seacoast and whose livelihood almost completely relies on the sea. Thus, their idioms are all about water, sailing, island and fish. However, China belongs to inland place where people usually live with earth. And most people’s activities are connected with agriculture, with the result that lots of Chinese idioms are connected with agriculture. For example, to show somebody being extravagant, there is a Chinese idiom ‘挥金如土’, while English idiom is ‘spend money like water. From this we can see that water in English and earths in Chinese has different influence on these two languages. There are other such English idioms, such as "sail under false colors"( 欺世盗名 )，"half sea over"( 酒喝得太多 ), "fish begins to stink at the head" ( 上梁不正下梁歪 )and so on., And Chinese idioms like 二人同心，黄土变金 (When two people are of the same mind, even clay may be changed into gold) , 种瓜得瓜，种豆得豆 ( as a man sows, so shall he reap ).