Abstract
Color is closely relevant to human life, appears in all aspects of people's life, which is perception of people to the objective world. In human language, there are a great variety of color words recording colors as well as denoting and describing the colorful things in the world. Owing to the cultural differences between Chinese and English color words, different color words carry with their different cultural connotations, these color words embedded with different national perceptions; which would result in a series of cultural connotations of color words. As we all known, the color words have rich and various cultural connotations. In order to understand their cultural connotations and avoid to misunderstand even wrong translation in the course of communication. It is of significance to have a comparative study on the cultural connotations and the translation of color words between English and Chinese. The thesis makes a comparison of the basic color words between English and Chinese from the view of culture. Meanwhile, it makes a summary on the fundamental of the methods of translation of Chinese and English color words, so as to avoid ambiguity and misunderstanding, for improving the cross-cultural communication ability.
Keywords: color words; cultural differences; translation; cultural connotations
Contents
Abstract I
Contents I
Introduction 1
1. Relationship between cultural differences and color words in Chinese and English 2
1.1 Cultural differences 2
1.2 Influences of traditional customs in color words 2
1.3 Historical factors 3
1.4 Religious influences 4
2. Specific contrasts of several color words in Chinese and English 5
2.1 Red in Chinese and English 5
2.2 Black in Chinese and English 5
2.3 White in Chinese and English 6
2.4 Blue in Chinese and English 7
2.5 Green in Chinese and English………………………………………………..8
3. Translation methods of Chinese and English color words 9
3.1 Literal Translation 9
3.2 Free Translation 10
3.3 Conversion Translation 10
3.4 Cultural Equivalence Translation 11
4. Color words in cross-cultural communication 12
5. Conclusion 13
References 14
