Abstract:Chinese idioms are defined as concise and comprehensive, vivid and imaginative words with stronger expressive force than the other Chinese words. Chinese idioms are favored by us Chinese people in the daily expressing throughout the history. This paper begins with brief description of the basic theory of Chinese idioms and gives out some translation strategies of relevant Chinese idioms. As we all know, figure of speech is often used in Chinese idioms and there are rich imaginary and vivid images in Chinese idioms. And these distinctive images often carry strong characteristics of national culture. So translating Chinese idioms into English exactly and properly is of great significance in cross-cultural communication. The scholars past and present, at home and abroad have made a lot of effort in the study of Chinese idioms. The study includes the origin, emerge, component, expression and the use of Chinese idioms in addition to its function, features, classification, cross culture communication and trend of development. The study also includes the comparison between Chinese idioms and English idioms. In this paper, the author chooses the idioms which use figure of speech to study and research, and then find out the images in these idioms. Images which carry rich cultural information include person or things found in the words of the idioms and person or things involved in the cultural background of the idioms. This paper will analyze and discuss the cultural information and take the differences between Chinese and Western culture into consideration in order to adopt proper strategies to translate these images. The author puts forward five strategies including retaining image, transplantation of image, converting image, adding image and abandoning image. At the same time, the author cites many examples to explain these strategies. And then, the author uses proper translation strategies to translate the whole idioms. At last, the author makes a conclusion about the whole study and put forward the corresponding suggestions. The author hopes that this paper could be helpful in the future translation practice of Chinese idioms.

Keywords: Chinese idioms; translation strategies; national culture; figure of speech; image

Contents

Abstract

中文摘要

Chapter 1 Introduction-1

Chapter 2 Literatural Review-3

Chapter 3 Translation Strategies-5

3.1 Retaining Image-5

3.2 Transplantation of Image-6

3.3 Converting Image-8

3.4 Abandoning Image-9

3.5 Adding Image-10

Chapter 4 Conclusion-13

References-15

Acknowledgements-16