Cultural Discrepancies Between Chinese And English Color Terms And Their Corresponding Translating Strategies

Vocabulary is the most active part of language. It can directly reflect the social changes and cultural developments. In a sense, vocabulary is the mirror of the society and culture, so is the color terms. The understanding and feelings to color terms of Chinese and English People are much alike, which underlies the possibility in cross-cultural communication as well as translatability.However the ways of thinking, beliefs, customs and habits of different cultures not only produce failures and misunderstandings in cross-cultural communication but also pose headaches to translators who are trying to produce"ideal"target texts. In terms of color terms, the associations, symbols and implied meanings of color terms to the different nations are different because of their different customs, environments, ways of thinking, religious beliefs and psychology. Therefore, in translation practice, what is important is to break the cultural barriers and convey the source cultural message faithfully and effectively.Based on the results of many researches, this paper mainly compares and analyzes the culture of the basic color terms in English and Chinese and introduces several strategies in translating color terms.This paper first introduces the notions of translation and culture, indicating the important trend in contemporary translation studies---cultural translation. Translation has been viewed as"cross-cultural communication". That's why this paper is intended to study and translate color terms from cultural perspective. Afterwards, it analyzes the differences between English culture and Chinese culture, and shows the close relationship between translating, language and culture.In the main part, the paper deals with cultural connotations of basic color words in English and Chinese and the causes for similarities and discrepancies. Then different translating methods are suggested to seek equivalence by citing several examples.By the contrastive study of cultural connotations of basic color terms between English and Chinese, we can know more about what is going on in people's mind, in their language and culture. However, cultural differences are hard to eliminate and the cultural distances grow out of them. Nevertheless, as acculturation becomes more frequent, the compensating approaches to the cultural distances caused by cultural factors will be improved continually, and the most succinct expressions will be used to make for the cultural distance within the maximum limit.