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In everyday life, animals have a wealth of expressive vocabularies, people often borrow animal words to express their feelings and enrich their language. Because of cultural differences, symbolic meanings of English and Chinese animal words are not the same, so in the translation practice, we should pay attention to proper handling of these animal words. These animal words influenced by the different forms, characteristics, and the impact of history and culture of different countries have been given different meanings. Because nowadays different countries or regions and different ethnic groups or communities want to understand each other and to know more about each other, in theory and practice, this topic has become a problem which is worthy of studying.源:自*751`%论,文'网·www.751com.cn/
2. Literature Review
In recent years, more and more linguistics and foreign scholars believe that vocabularies play an important role in the usage and acquisition of languages. Idioms are an important part of those vocabularies and we can say most vocabularies that people currently discuss belong to the category of idioms. For a long time, English idioms have not been paid enough attention by experts and scholars at home and abroad, not to mention one of its branches: animal idioms. Today, the definition of English idioms remains controversial, not to mention its systematic research from interdisciplinary, multi-level perspective.
There are few foreign researches relevant to the studies of animal idioms. Early linguists firstly sourced the expression of functional idioms and comprehensive classification and interpretation, one of its representatives is British linguist Mcmordie. W (1978), who classified animal idioms as a part of the idioms, and classified communicational functions to explain animal idioms, expression of emotions, attitudes, desires, determinations like angry, cursing, etc. According to the habits of animals, foreign linguists pointed out animal idioms’ classification, Christine Ammer (1999), in her Cool Cats, Top Dogs, and Other Beastly Expressions book, animal words were pided into cats and dog pets’ idioms, birds’ idioms, and farm animal-related idioms, park animal idioms and underwater animal idioms. Among all of these animals, dogs and horses play the most important role in the idioms. Affected by systemic functional linguistics, linguists began to explore the role and function of English idioms caused in communicative activities. For example, A Comprehensive Understanding of English Idioms edited by American linguist Robertson.D (1987) and Kramsch’s (1995) book The Language and Culture reflects this trend. Linguist Ruth Benedict, in his book Patterns of Culture pointed out that the cultural significance of the animal idioms reflect on three levels, the surface, middle and deep. Surface culture of English animal idioms belongs to material culture, including all tangible sense of the material and spiritual goods, reflecting in the architecture, clothing, food, appliances and so on. Cultural performance of English animal idioms is mainly consisted by the institutional culture, including manners and customs. Deep cultural implications of English animal idioms generally refer to spiritual meanings; they are influenced by people’s thoughts and activities and these manifested formations include values, ways of thinking, aesthetic taste, habits of mind, morality, religion, philosophy and so on. 文献综述
Domestic researches and scholars study the dynamics of animal idioms, they started from animal’s associations at first, and then discussed animal idioms’ common use, such as cats, dogs, horses, and they all have intimate contact with human beings. English idioms and their cultural origins edited by Li Yuping analyzed the associative meaning of pets and gave us examples; the Comprehensive English Idiom Dictionary (1985), published by Xiamen University, recorded 90 idioms related with dog, about 80 related to horses, and 60 related to cats. In animal idioms classification, scholars Luo Shiping pided it into four categories in his book study of English (2005), land animals idioms, birds’ idioms, aquatic animal idioms and insects idioms. The book Comparison and translation between English and Chinese which were published by Yang Zijian (2000), points out the animal idioms are classified by nouns and verbs idiom. Research methods of animal idioms, mainly includes English and Chinese comparison, metaphor cognitive approach, learning context, seeking origins and comparative translation. For example, Bao Huinan’s Cultural context and language translation; Professor Du Xinyu’s A study on the differences of English and Chinese language culture from animal idioms and Intercultural communication of translation written by Professor Jin Huikang (2006). The differences between this thesis and other works lie in that it not only traces more different causes of symbolic meanings in animal idioms, but also put most of this information together to make people aware of culture differences. The thesis also gives us some positive pieces of advices to help avoid pragmatic failure when using animal idioms in intercultural communications.