Comparison And Translation Of Cultural Images Between English And Chinese

Most cultural images are the embodiments of wisdoms and historical cultures of varied nations, of which a certain high percentage have close relationships with each nation's legends, worship or totems at the very beginning of the nation's formation (Xie Tianzhen, 1999). The English and Chinese peoples have different cultural images or the same image denotes various cultural connotations in most cases due to the distinctive geographical positions, traditions or religions. The issue of the cultural image has been touched upon in a number of books including Culture and Translating (Guo Jianzhong, 2000), Cultural Context and Language Translating (Bao Huinan, 2001), to name only a few.The comparison and translation of cultural image has been experimented in poems or the culturally loaded numbers, animals and plants, color words or metaphors between English and Chinese. However, the achievement mostly concentrates on the words and phrases from the aesthetic perspective, which are scattered here and there unsystematically.This paper aims at comparing the cultural images between the languages of English and Chinese at the levels of word, metaphor, sentence and text in a systematic manner. The Figure-Ground Theory is imported to analyze the cultural image at the sentence and text level between English and Chinese so that the cultural images in the source language should be retained as the cultural uniqueness under most circumstances in order to enrich the target language as well as for the purpose of understanding across the cultural barriers.In the first chapter, some typical objects, color words, numbers and onomatopoeias between the two languages are selected for comparison in order to trace the differentiation of thinking patterns owing to various histories, traditions or religious beliefs. The second chapter deals with metaphors that are permeated with cultural images between English and Chinese from the perspective of cognition so as to detect similarities and dissimilarities. Chapter Three employs the Figure-Ground inthe analysis in the sentences. In the fourth chapter, the cultural image is taken into consideration from the viewpoint of text, especially its function in cohesion and coherence between the two languages, in which the target culture's acceptability is concerned as well.