Idioms: Cultural Loading And Translation

Both English and Chinese abound in idioms. They are colorful md, like a mirror, reflect the national character of a people. Idioms are ;erse, vivid and often culturally loaded. They give translators a big leadache in translating-between Chinese and English in our case. Therefore this study focuses on cultural loading in idioms and treatment of such idioms in the process of translating.A lot of articles and even books have written about the translation of idioms especially about the translation of the genre of proverbs. However, most of these articles and books do not have a very clearly defined clue. They only pointed out the differences between idioms in different cultures or suggested methods to be used in dealing with idiom translation, but didn't explain why we should choose these ways in dealing with them. This study focuses on the cultural loading in idioms translation. It discusses the treatment of idioms in translating from Chinese into English and vice versa. The definition of idioms used in this paper is a very broad one-any type of set phrases in English and Chinese, including proverbs, four-character phrase and two part saying in Chinese. This is an old topic, but we try to handle it in a new way and view idioms from new perspectives.First we introduce the important concepts of imagery and cultural loading. With the presence or absence of these two elements as the criteria, we divide English and Chinese idioms into three neat groups: 1) straightforward idioms, that is, idioms that contain no images and metaphors; 2) idioms containing images that do not have cultural loading, or national coloring; 3) idioms containing images that are culturally loaded to different extents, in other words, have different degrees of national coloring.Then we try to analyze the problem in the light of relevance theory and Nida's remarks about equivalence. We hold that both English and Chinese are rich languages and the two nations have similar experiences, idioms can be translated between these two languages. Even such difficult ones as two-part sayings can be made understandable to English readers.Finally, we come up with a series of useful techniques that can be used to treat idioms in translation. From our analyses and the techniques we put forward, we can draw this conclusion: Translation is, after all, translating meaning and idioms are only part of the text to be translated. Therefore, we must get the meaning across by all means, and try to reproduce the original cultural loading in the target language as far as possible. And, just as we did in the previous chapters, every technique offered here is analyzed in the light of relevance theory.