A Study On Chinese Translation Conformity Of English Idiom

English idioms,as the essence of a language and the most culturally loaded expressions,are highly used in native speaker’s daily conversation and writing.From the perspective of the Functional Equivalence Theory,this research makes an analysis on the general phenomenon for Chinese translation failure of English idiom,which aims to explore the specific reason for this translation failure and how to choose translation strategy to transfer the message of the source text so that to make the expression appropriate to the receptor cultural level.It is demonstrated that the root cause of the translation failure is the lack of exhaustive and systematic knowledge of English idiom,such as characteristic,classification,origin and the difference with Chinese language.This study collects nearly 300 idioms from the authoritative English and Chinese idiom dictionaries and makes an analysis on the characteristic,classification and origin of English idioms and comparison with Chinese idioms.Based on the analysis,this study tries to classify English idioms into three types,namely idioms concerned with cultural overlap,cultural mismatch and cultural vacancy,combined with Functional Equivalence Theory,then uses the case study method and the method of contrastive analysis to make an analysis on the Chinese translation difficulties and strategies of them.From the perspective of Functional Equivalence Theory,the nature of translation is to find the natural equivalent closest to the source language information,and the translation should conform to the grammatical rules and expression habits of the target language.Therefore,based on the above analysis and combined with the Functional Equivalence Theory,this study puts forward translation strategies and suggestions on how to choose translation strategies in terms of the phenomena-cultural overlap,cultural mismatch and cultural vacancy.This study enriches the perspective of idiom translation and aims to provide some references for the practice of translating English idioms into Chinese.