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I．Introduction
Language is the carrier of the culture. For one thing, language is a part of culture and plays an important role in it. Thus it reflects culture. For another, as a mirror of culture, language is strongly influenced and shaped by culture. Idioms include metaphorical phrases, slang, colloquialism, proverbs and so on. As an essential part of the language and culture of a society, idioms are involving geography, history, religious belief, living conventions and so on. They are usually highly specialized in meaning and closely tied to distinctive cultural features and cultural attitudes. It is believed that idioms are the most culturally loaded elements in any language’s vocabulary. Thus,本论文由英语论文网 www.51lunwen.org整理提供 if used properly, idioms will add life as well as vividness to one’s expression or illustration. On the contrary, without idioms language may become boring or even lifeless. The understanding of idioms can lead people to a better understanding about a certain culture.
Despite the fact that idioms are commonly used in everyday life, their meanings are not always self-evident, for the meaning can not be deduced from the meaning of their individual constituents. They are sometimes difficult to understand even for the native people. What’s more, because idioms are stable in structure, unpredictable in meaning, and rich in cultural factors, they are often major barriers in inter-cultural communications, and idiom translation may be considered as the most difficult in translation. Generally, the most difficult thing in idioms translation centers on dealing with the cultural factors. There mainly involve two ways used in translation, foreignization and domestication. Domestication demands a closeness of the translation to the reader’s language. A domestication translation reads as if the original text was written in the local language. Foreignization requires the translators to express the author’s idea in a way that is similar to the usage and expression in the author’s language. Personally, the strategy of foreignization has made a far greater contribution to Chinese idioms translation, because it can keep the translation script faithful to the original and getting the target readers well acquainted with Chinese culture.
II. Culture and translation
A. The definition of culture
There are many definitions of the culture. One of the oldest and widely-accepted definitions of culture was formulated by the English anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor in 1871. It is used by the Encyclopedia Britannica (1983,vol.4:657) to introduce the topic, and Edward Sapir quoted it widely: “ culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society.” By 1952, American anthropologists Alfred Louis Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1961:181) had compiled a list of 164 definitions. Their lengthy (165th) contribution was as follows: culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit of and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting and distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiment in artefacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e., historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values. Culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning elements of future action.
B. The relationship b