A Probe Into Idiomatic Expression And Its Translation

Idiomatic expressions are pervasive and important language phenomena in every language. They appear with a high frequency in literary creations and daily communications. Owing to their structure specialty and connotation richness, the translation of idiomatic expressions is attracting more and more attentions from translators. In present days, with fast development of cross-cultural communications and corporations, how to properly convey the rich cultural connotations of idiomatic expressions is becoming the focus of people's attention. Relevance Theory is a new translation theory which associates translating activity with people's cognitive context. In this theory, translation is considered to be a communicative behavior but not an automatic text transformation between different languages. It is an inferential process full of complicated pondering and decision-making. This thesis is to tentatively probe into idiomatic expression and its translation with the aid of Relevance Theory.This thesis is divided into the following five parts:Chapter 1 introduces the definitions and the sources of both English and Chinese idiomatic expressions, which are fundamental for the following analyzing.Chapter 2 analyzes the features of idiomatic expressions: the basic features include fixity and conventionality; the rhetorical features lie on the appliance of similes, metaphors, and other figure of speech; and the language of idiomatic expressions is vivid, colloquial, and rich in emotions.Chapter 3 introduces the meaning constitution of idiomatic expressions. Besides the literal meaning, both English and Chinese idiomatic expressions bear cultural connotation. Based on this introduction, the author explores the specialty and key points of idiomatic...