The Cultural Differences Contrast Of Basic Color Word In Chinese And Japanese

Language is the carrier of culture. Any language is influenced by social culture. Color words used todescribe the color of a variety of things are the indispensable elements in the language. Due to different socialand cultural background, even the same color, different nation will have its own associations and emotionalorientation. We can learn about that it has a rich cultural symbolism, and it contains different ethnic culturaland emotional through color words. Through the comparison of the representative color words in specificsocial habits and customs, we can see that Chinese and Japanese have large difference in the view of colorculture. This article is based on the four basic color of red, white, blue, black to relate the differences of colorculture between Chinese and Japanese culture. It also summarizes the translation issues and approaches ofcolour words in cross-cultural communication. This paper consists of five parts. The first part generalizes thecurrent rearch status of the color words from the status quo of domestic, Japanese and the comparative study ofJapanese and Chinese color words. The second part analyses the etymology of the basic color words: red, white,blue and black. The third part compares and summarizes the differences in cultural symbolism. There are greatdifferences between China and Japan in the color cultural. If red is the representative color of China, thenwhite is the color of the Japanese. Red is a symbol of lucky, success, happiness, auspicious things in China,but red is usually regarded as a symbol of unfortunate and disasters in Japan; white thought of as the symbol of“pure Paradise”is the favoritest, respected color in Japan, but it contains a taboo meaning, used to refer tomore fierce funeral and unlucky things in China. The fourth part through corpus analysis the understanding andtranslation of basic color language in cross-cultural communication, summarizes the translation method of color words and the factors affecting the translation of color words. The fifth part is a systematic summary ofthe basic content of this paper.