Abstract
English and Chinese have a rich vocabulary of color words. Although different ethnic may have same awareness for natural colors, color words have a different connotation and denotation when they are used in different language domains. Some color words can express more meanings which are far away from its original meaning. Moreover, one same color word in different ethnic and cultural backgrounds can have differences on the extension of the figurative meaning. Many color words don’t express their literal meaning in sentences, but extended meaning which hid in two different cultures. Depending on scientific research, there are should be about seven million colors in nature. But surprisingly, there’re only hundreds of classifications in expressing them. Color words are closely connected with people’s daily life. There’re also a variety of expressions of color. From these expressions, we can easily find different physiology and emotional in both Chinese and English. In fact, color is basically a visual effect received by man’s eyes. During these studies in color words, both foreign and domestic researchers pay attention to the meaning and its origin in their own culture. There are fewer studies for the cross-culture translation for color words. This thesis tries to use Nida’s Functional Equivalence Theory to explore how to translate color words and make the readers feel or respond same as the native speakers do.
Keywords color words; Functional Equivalence Theory; culture difference
Contents
Abstract I
Contents I
1. Introduction 1
2. Functional Equivalence Theory 2
2.1The Definition of Functional Equivalence Theory 2
2.2 The Development of Functional Equivalence Theory 2
3. A Comparison between English and Chinese Color Words 4
3.1 Different Psychology Effects 4
3.2 Different Culture Effects 4
4. Translation Methods 6
4.1 Literal Translation 6
4.2 Free Translation 7
5. Conclusion 9
References 10
