On Cultural Differences in English and Chinese Proverbs and Translation Strategy 英语毕业论文.doc

On Cultural Differences in English and Chinese Proverbs and Translation Strategy Abstract Having left their deep and unique stamps on the language, proverbs can best express the historical process, cultural tradition and customs of the people. The present article, adopting a contrastive approach, attempts to put forward the distinctive characteristics of both English and Chinese proverbs, namely, metaphorical language integrate meaning, fixed collocation and euphonious sound. It tries to make an analysis of their cultural discrepancies in terms of geography, custom and religious belief. And then it draws conclusions of specific strategy to deal with cultural similarities and cultural differences in translation. Key words: English and Chinese proverbs; characteristics; cultural differences; translation strategy Introduction As we know, in the English and Chinese language proverbs are widely used. They are passed from generation to generation without changing, even some proverbs are grammatically wrong. In both English and Chinese proverbs are very rich-full. How these proverbs produced? This is the first problem which is discussed in this paper. Proverbs are product of people’s social practices. So no matter in which language, proverbs have some common characteristics, such as metaphorical language, integrate meaning, fixed collocation euphonious sound and so on. Proverbs are essentially national in character, that is to say, their components are mostly native elements. English and Chinese proverbs posses their own national culture. Many people cannot properly understand the meaning of a phrase or sentence without a new work in it just because they know little about cultural difference between English and Chinese proverbs. The English-speaking and Chinese-speaking people posse different cultures. They live in different geography environment, have different customs and hold different religious believes. Those elements make the translation a hard work to solve the pro