A Cultural Comparison Study Of Idiom In Moment In Peking

Vocabulary is the basic component of language, which is the backbone of the largescale language system. Cultural-loaded words have the high status in both English and Chinese language. Inherent with rich cultural connotations, these cultural-loaded words can reflect the cultural characteristics directly or indirectly, of which the most representative ones are idioms. Based on Lin‘s original work and Zhang‘s translated version of Moment in Peking, a cultural comparison study is made to explore Chinese and western Cultural characteristics from the perspective of idioms, and to reveal the cultural diversities. This analysis is of a certain practical significance to deepen the cognition of Chinese and western cultures, to make an accurate application of Chinese and English, and also to improve the effectiveness of cross-cultural communication.Based on Jef Verschuren‘s Linguistic Adaptation Theory, the paper mainly chooses three perspectives of theory: the mental world of the language user, salience of adaptability and dynamics of adaptability, which bears a close relationship with appliance of idioms. Close reading method is first used to make a basic study, then case analysis is used to make an analysis of Chinese characteristics, finally contrastive analysis is applied to the comparative study of Sino-western cultures. The corpus selection and analysis is according to Nida‘s cultural translation theory on cultural classification. Ninety typical idioms and metaphoric idioms are chosen out from all the excerpts both in Lin‘s original work Moment in Peking and Zhang‘s translated version, with 30 examples respectively belonging to each field of social culture, religion culture and language culture, aiming at studying its distribution of cultural categories and idiomatic characteristics. Besides, the paper makes a research on translation methods applied in the study of English and Chinese idioms, analyzes the cultural characteristics embedded in classical metaphoric idioms, and makes a comparison of the ontology and figurative body in Chinese and western society.The findings are as follows. The three cultural categories are of a proper distribution in Moment in Peking, i.e. social culture, linguistic culture and religion culture, of which linguistic culture takes the predominant status. They are well inherent in idioms and further presented by the study of ontology and figurative body in metaphoric idioms. Compared with the original work by Lin, Zhang‘s translated version applies different translation methods to distinct cultures, with literal translation as the dominant method, with free translation as a supplementary. Chinese social culture is comprised of every aspect of daily life, such as the economics and politics in society, social relationship etc., which is reflected by literal translation, while transliteration is used to retain Chinese traditional customs. Furthermore, the similarities and differences of Sino-western cultures are reflected through cognition of animal images and colors. Idiom is inherent with philosophy and symmetry of linguistic culture, which is well presented through colloquialism, proverbs in the aspect of character depiction, personal description and thoughts illumination. As to the religion culture inherent in idioms, on one hand, the deep influence of Confucianism and Buddhism on Chinese culture is well presented; on the other hand, by comparison the difference of Chinese-western religion is clearly demarcated, with the characteristic of Chinese honoring heaven while western people showing more respect in God.