Discussion On English Translation Of Numbers In The Four-character Idioms

Numbers, as an important way of knowing the world for human being, are characters or signs for expressing amount and are very close to our life. They have recorded the progress of human civilization. Historical and cultural conditions are different in different language societies so that the language systems are different, which makes numbers have distinct national culture marks besides the function of expressing amount. Therefore, doing well in the translation of numbers is helpful to improve our translation theory and spread our national culture.As a very important part in Chinese culture, the significance of the Chinese idioms is self-evident. According to some statistics, the total amount of Chinese idioms is about ten thousand (the Big Thesaurus of Chinese Idioms collects more than 18,000 idioms). Among them, there are large amount of idioms being composed of numbers or containing numbers. These numbers express not only the meaning of amount but also the abstract meanings. Doing well in the research of this kind of idioms will be helpful to our future work on translating Chinese idioms and will also promote the spread of our national culture.In order to do research on the translation of the numbers in Chinese idioms, we get the samples—the Chinese idioms (537 in total) which exist not only in the Big Thesaurus of Chinese Idioms published in 1987 by Shanghai Dictionary Publishing Agency but also in the Chinese-English Dictionary published in 1997 by Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, build up a database and in this close area, classify and analyze the law regulating the English translations of the numbers. From the analysis we can get some conclusions which we hope could contribute to our future research in the English translations of idioms. This paper can be mainly divided into five parts:Part I is the preface, pointing out the situation of current research on this subject, making it clear about the research significance and research methods.In part II we classify the materials in database and sum up the English translations of the numbers in Chinese idioms. The discussion is divided into four parts: idioms with one number, idioms with two numbers, idioms with three numbers and idioms with four numbers.In part III we summarize and analyze the translations of the numbers and know the general distribution of the ways of translations so that we get the law regulating these translations. We try to find out the causes from different aspects.Part IV sums up the problems needing to pay attention to when translating Chinese idioms with numbers, points out considering both real meaning and false meaning from dynamic and static angles, correctly deals with the relationship between "form" and "meaning", and make different treatments to translate the same number. Part V mainly studies the guiding significance of our research to the translation of the idioms. On one hand we try to correct the false translations in the dictionary, on the other hand we make a superficial discussion on the translation of the idioms with numbers in an article.We build the database by making cards, adopt the method of combining analysis and synthesis, refer to the relative research results and make a systematic research and statement on the English translations of the numbers in Chinese idioms. We hope our research could contribute to the translation work of the Chinese idioms with numbers.