An Empirical Study On Transformation Difficulties In Chinese Idiom Translation

Translation has experienced a history of thousands of years. The study of translation is a long-standing subject in the study of language and culture, not only for the very long history but also for the fact that translation is the bridge for understanding different cultures and communicating with different people. Thus, the study of translation is important for college students. Idioms, as a kind of particular form of language, fully reflect a nation's characters in language, culture, and way of thinking and so on. It is a common phenomenon in almost every language, so idiom translation is a necessary part of the translation study. Because of the particularity of idioms, idiom translation is not so easy for translators, especially for students. It is well known that the teaching of idiom translation is difficult and the students'abilities in idiom translation need to be improved, however, the author finds very few researches focus on the transformation difficulties the students meet in idiom translation and pay attention to the specific types of their transformation difficulties. The thesis tries to concentrate on analyzing such different transformation difficulties from three aspects, i.e. culture, language and way of thinking and proposes some suggestions on teaching idiom translation effectively. The author analyzes each aspect according to the data of translation assignments and the results of in-depth discussions. Social customs, living experience and literary works are chosen for the study in the aspect of culture. Range of word use and sentence structure are chosen for the study in the aspect of language. And changes from concrete to abstract and from fuzziness to accuracy are chosen for the study in the aspect of way of thinking.The subjects involved are 66 students majoring in English in an ordinary university of Sichuan Province. In addition to in-depth discussions with the students, one questionnaire and three translation assignments are used in this study. The author collects all the related data and deals with them by mathematics statistics and analysis.This thesis consists of the following five chapters.Chapter One is an introduction, which gives the definitions of"idiom"and"transformation", points out that students face some difficulties in the transformation of idiom translation and makes a brief introduction of the structure in the thesis.Chapter Two is a literature review. Some related theories are introduced, including the theories of translation criterion, translation process, cognitive mechanism of idioms and linguistic adaptation of idiom translation.Chapter Three explores the process of the study, and elaborates the research design as well as the process of data collection.Chapter Four analyzes the data collected from the mistakes arising from the understanding of culture, language and way of thinking and explains accordingly what kind of difficulties students meet in the transformation of idiom translation.Chapter Five concerns conclusion and suggestions. The author summarizes the whole research process, puts forward the conclusion of the present study, attempts to provide some suggestions on how to improve the students'ability of idiom translation in teaching, and describes the limitations and recommendations.