Chinese Idiom Translation

Idioms are the refined usage of languages. They are special but well established through hundreds of years of development. Bred by the rich culture, Chinese language boasts of a great deal of idioms or set phrases that show the wisdom of Chinese people.However, the translation of Chinese idiom has remained a hard nut for translation practitioners due to their distinguished features. They usually take fixed and stable forms; they have hidden meanings closely linked with the culture behind simple words and they are vivid and sound pleasant to ears because they often employ figures of speech. All these features constitute the difficulty of rendering them into another totally different language like English.This thesis takes the relative equivalence theory proposed by Mona Baker as the central theory to analyze whether Chinese idioms, especially those heavily culturally loaded, can be translated. According to Baker, non-equivalence is absolutely in existence and equivalence is only a relative concept. Therefore, translating Chinese idioms into English will certainly meet with the problems of non-equivalence. The point is what strategies shall we use and how to use in order to achieve the maximum equivalence. Whichever strategy that one chooses, the translation would not be perfect. What we should do is to weigh the advantages and disadvantages of using these strategies and try to render the Chinese idioms in the most proper way. Many idioms are chosen from Hongloumeng (The Dream of Red Mansions), a well-known Chinese classical novel, as examples. We think it more practical and convincible if we testify the translation theory in the real context.