A Comparative Study Of English & Chinese Euphemisms And Their Translation

Euphemism is a common linguistic as well as cultural phenomenon in daily life. It is not only euphemistic words, sentences, discourses, but also a way of expression by the application of language to communication. In a sense, without proper application of euphemism, communication would be impossible. Euphemism has become one of the major subjects of cross-cultural communication studies as people come to realize the significance of euphemism. In most cases, euphemism can cover unpleasant, disgusting, terrifying realities and can also hide embarrassing or face-threatening things. Therefore, we can say it is a sort of "lubricating oil" in language communication, which oils the human relationship and helps to save face of communicators.Euphemism, defined as an alternative expression to one that is less preferred, is a rhetorical device requiring some interpretation within the source language before any attempt is made to translate it into another. Since every euphemism may hold various denotative and associative meanings besides certain occasional meaning derived when put into practical using. Under this circumstance the translator has to resort to the linguistic and non-linguistic contexts as the determiner. The non-linguistic context is a most complex system including all the factors, material or spiritual. For this reason, the thesis analyzes the relationship between euphemism and Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, Indirect Speech Act Theory and Face Theory because the task of pragmatics is to put utterances into certain context and to discover how language is used in different context. By doing this, the translation of English and Chinese euphemisms would be much easier.The study of euphemisms attracts great interest for both eastern and western scholars and some exciting progress has been made both at home and abroad, but the scope of the previous study has been so far mainly restricted to the level of lexicon. Inspired by the preceding achievements made, taking into account the existing problems unsolved, the author formulates a new approach to the analysis of English euphemism—a comparative approach. By comparison, some linguistic and cultural characteristics of English and Chinese euphemisms are more obvious and distinct, which also provide a basis for their translation.