Cultural Connotation and Translation in Chinese and English Animals文献综述

 2022-09-09 16:00:20

ChapterⅡLiterature Review

2.1 An Overview of Previous Studies on Animal Idioms

According to the statistic from He Shanfen (2005), there are around 498 common animal words both in Chinese and English languages. Actually, due to the significance of animal idioms, it has been studied at home and aboard for a long time, and also has been practiced by people of different fields including linguists, folklorists, anthropologists, sociolinguists and so on. And they really have done a lot detailed researches from many angles.

Some researches now available mainly focus on analyzing and explaining the causes of different cultural connotation under the different culture background by exploring and comparing the animal words. And some is about translation. As for the former one, some scholars study on the comparison and contrast of animal metaphors, and then to dig out the different cultural connotation between Chinese and English languages. Metaphor is one kind of rhetorical devices, and analyzing the metaphorical meaning of animals in the Chinese and English idioms is one branch of linguistic task. In this respect, Chen Dezhang (1999) did a research of cultural connotation of animal words in English and Chinese and found out what images people have over 30 common animals. Some researchers study on the English and Chinese contrastive linguistic, for instance, at home, Yu Fumin (1996) made successful efforts in comparing English and Chinese idioms; and Liao Guangrong (2000) contrasted and analyzed the number of culturally-loaded animal words, each kind of animals, and their cultural connotation and the causes. She thought that English and Chinese culturally-loaded animal words differ in meaning owing to the different contents, which is in accord with most of the scholarsrsquo; opinions.

And some researchers pay much attention to the translation. Wei Xiaofeng (2005) indicated that translation is a cross-cultural language communication activity; it is not only the transformation process of language information, but a kind of cultural transmission. Culturally-loaded animal idioms contain distinctive cultural connotations and identities, which adds difficulties to translation. Lou Yougen (2007) thought that though the conceptual meaning of different animal words is the same or similar, the connotative meaning is widely divergent sometimes. Therefore, literal translation plus explanation is applied to translate both animal idioms in Chinese and English. Some scholars suggest that the semantic and the pragmatic should be equivalence when in translation. For instance, when an animal idiom is mentioned, they should first probe the relationship between the culture and translation, and then to solve it properly. Li Yue (2003) pointed out that the basis of translation on animal idioms is the roughly equivalence of cultural connotation. Translators should keep the figure of primitive language, and then transform or paraphrase it into a way that target languages are usually in.

All in all, lots of the language scholars have realized the significance of animal idioms. They mainly do the researches from the perspective of cultural connotation and translation. And on the basic of their researches, an increasing number of related studies will be in depth, to understand, respect and appreciate other cultures, overcome the obstacles in cross-cultural development, and then make the communication more smoothly.

2.2 Cultural Connotation and Idioms

In Semantics, Geoffrey Leech (1974) divided the meaning of a word into seven types, one of which was called as connotative meaning. He defined that a word, besides its pure rational content, had a communicative value by virtue of the content the word referred to. That is to say, when people talk about the connotative meaning, they actually refer to the experience that the word makes them associate in the real world when they use or hear the word. Therefore, the connotative meaning varies from person to person, and among different ages, societies and countries, it is different also.

On the same cultural condition, because of the different living environment, growth experience and degree of education, people hold the different attitude towards even a certain same thing, let alone among different culture communities. Marxist philosophy believes in that human thinking not only has its university, but its particularity. And the thinking mode is the core part of the culture, so that all national cultures both have the similarities and individualities. Due to the different natural environment, economic development level, political systems and ideology, people under the diverse cultural frames show the different attitudes. And this kind of connotation meaning which is rooted in cultural background is called as the cultural connotation of words.

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