On The Translation Of Culturally Distinctive Words In C-E Dictionaries

Language carries and reflects culture which in turn influences language. Meanings of words are also influenced by culture which is one topic of cultural semantics. Meanings of words in a language are influenced by different aspects of a specific culture and can not be fully understood by foreigners without certain knowledge of that culture. The greater the differences between two cultures, the greater the importance of cultural meanings in the understanding of the foreign language are. Words with national-cultural meanings are called national-cultural words or culture-bound words and in comparison of two languages, those whose cultural meanings are specific to one culture are culturally distinctive words. Due to their distinctiveness, culturally distinctive words often cast great difficulties in cross-cultural communications because the specialty of their cultural meanings and the indispensability in understanding make them impossible to be fully understood and correctly used by people in culture other. Bilingual dictionaries provide a place for comparison of two languages and two cultures. They are not special dictionaries on cultures but according to ideas in cultural semantics, the neglects of cultural meanings of words will affect dictionaries'users understanding. In C-E dictionaries, a great deal of culturally distinctive words exist owing to the great differences between Chinese and western cultures. However, in spite of a lot of discussions on the methods of translating these words and the necessity of providing cultural information to these words, few explore the reasons why cultural information is often missing in C-E dictionaries. This thesis is to take the translations of two culturally distinctive words—"Li (pinyin for礼)"and"Li Jiao (pinyin for礼教)"as examples and tries to find out problems of their translations in C-E dictionaries and makes tentative explanations from the aspects of cultural background, equivalents of culturally distinctive words, changes of words'meanings and other aspects.