A Cross-Cultural Perspective On Language Ahd Culture

Along with the globalization’s deepening, the cross-cultural exchange between China and the west is becoming increasingly frequent. Differences between the two diverse cultures are inevitably shown on languages, while communications between languages can also exert effects on cultures. Thus, a better understanding of the relation between language and culture is vital to cross-cultural communication. Bible, as one of the two sources of western culture, is not only the Christian Classics, but also a platform that shows the core values of the west. And the Bible has long been an area of research focus for generations of linguists.From the perspective of cross-cultural communication, the thesis takes the Bible as the research object by making a comparison between the English and Chinese versions of the Bible. By putting religion, an indispensable part of culture, into the research field, the thesis is trying to take a probe into the relation between language and culture. Since the early1900s, western researchers have begun their theoretical studies on language and culture, among which the most famous and influential one is the "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis", as referred to in this thesis. To be concrete, two major research questions are thus addressed:1) How does culture’s influence on language be reflected in the two versions of the Bible?2) How did language’s influence on culture realize during the process of the spread of Bible to China and what are these influences?Based on the literature review of previous researches, the present study is a comparative study that will give us a band-new conception of the relation between language and culture. From this thesis, it can be found that culturally differences are vividly shown in languages, and at the same time the spread of language can bring about influences to culture. By doing so, the thesis also analyzes possible sources that could have attributed to the obstacles thus derived in cross-cultural communication, which will shed light to the promotion of its further development.