A New Perspective On Idiom Studies: English Idioms In Texts And Their Chinese Translation

The study of English idioms is an old topic: a lot of studies and researches have been done by scholars home and abroad, also a lot of papers even books are published. But studies of English idioms in the past have largely focused on the syntactic and semantic properties as well as the mental processing and comprehension of such expression, to the neglect of their discoursal functions. As for the study of Chinese translation of English idioms, most examples used by these studies are just isolated sentences coined unconsciously and without a real context.Based on authentic data of both written and spoken English, this paper attempts to study the use of English idioms in texts. It is found that idioms seem to have important organizational and evaluative functions. Seen from the perspective of functional discourse analysis, English idioms, used in hyper-themes and macro-themes, serve to organize texts and \or signal forthcoming information. The paper also probes into the issue of cohesion in relation to the use of English idioms. At the same time, traditional studies on idiom translation just discuss how to translate single idiom but rarely discuss from the angle of text. The paper attempts to analyze the issue of Chinese translation of English idioms from the perspective of text.The paper then turns to discuss the Chinese translation of English idioms in texts. During this process, we may meet difficulties with idioms of two kinds: we do not understand them or we find them hard to translate. The paper firstly introduces general approaches to idiom translation: literal approach, literal translation plus annotation, the approach of borrowing and free translation. Then points out that all these ways isolate idioms from their contexts and the paper thus tries to study the idiom translation in texts. The paper attempts to put forward that translators should cultivate text awareness and make full use of the context to translate English idioms. Last but not least, the paper tries to analyze how to translate metaphorical meaning of English idioms in texts.