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This paper consists of five parts. The first part is a brief introduction to the essay. In the second part the literature review and relative theories about color words are presented. In the third part, is the classification of color terms and comparative study of the cultural connotations of six basic color words. In the fourth part, offers four strategies in translating the color words. At last, it is the conclusion of the paper.
II. Literature Review and Relative Theories
This chapter gives a general review of the previous studies related to the present paper.
The research on color terms has a long history both in China and in foreign countries. The earliest study even can be traced back to Greece. With the appearance of natural science in the 17th century, people studied color and color terms which closely related to physics and optics. In the 18th century, the study of color words went up to the aesthetic with the development of philosophy. In the 19th century, people study color words mainly from the cultural perspective. Since the last century, schorlors tend to concentrate their attention on the system of color terms. In recent years, with the development of economic, language plays an so important role in cross-cultural communication. As one part of human language, the color terms is becoming more and more significant. The exports and scholars pay a great attention to the color terms from different fields and levels both at home and abroad. Here are some of the meaningful studies.
Berlin & Kay suggested that there has not a definitely difination for the expression of “basic color words”, they also put forward four primary standers of basic color words in the book Basic Color Terms：Their Universality and Evolution..
Berlin and Kay propose that there are just eleven color words commonly used in English,that is: White、Black、Red、Green、Blue、Yellow、Orange、Purple、Pink、Brown and Gray. The Study of Colors was written by the literary giant Goethe, he belives that shades of colors in nature mirrors the feelings and attitudes of huam beings. He contends that different psychological states of feelings can be lively expressed by different colors in terms of warmness and coldness. The book Cross-cultural Investgation of Color Terms written by Magnus in 1880, stands for that the color terms represent different culturals in different nations. He insists the view that color terms are not only linguistically relatively but also semantically cultural-specific. Influenced by his theory, people tend to turn their attentions to the relationship between color words’semantics and their psychological foundations. The Study of the Color Lexicon by Lakoff in 1973, claims that color words can not only descripe the objective things, it also has the symbolic meanings. The cultural connotation of color words are taken into accound. All the studies about color words abroad mentioned above laid a solid foundation for future study. Besides, they also offer important advice and guidance to the relative research in China.
The Chinese scholars also did many meaningful research on color words. In the early times Chinese scholoars put their attentions to the Chinese color terms. The literature and exegesis experts have made the analysis study of the production and development of the five basic color words in ancient Chinese characters as early as in the 1940s. In 1964, there is a detailed description of the usage of almost all the English color terms and their translation in Zhang Peiji’s writing Onomatopoeia Works & Color Terms and Their Translation. Later, with the republiction of Probing Into Fuzzy Language and Re-probing Into Fuzzy Language written by WuTieping, in which introduces the concept of fuzzy language, drew the attention of scholoars into color terms’ application in fuzzy language. From then on, many scholors focus their minds on the comparison of the color terms between Chinese and other languages. They intend to find the differences in language and culture and make contribution to the cross-cultural communication. The study on color terms took further action and be a climb to the top in 1990s. People hold the view that the relationship of color words and culture can be said that language and culture are connected and interwoven each other. Color terms is the carrier of culture and culture is loaded in color terms. Yao Xiaoping makes a summary of the theories of basic color terms,and review the development of color words in the opus: On the Theories of Basic Color Terms:The Evolution of Chinese Basic Color Terms （1988）. Otherwise, the definition of “connotation”in Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary is expressed as “an idea suggested by a word in addition to its main meaning”. We can learn from the definition that a word’s connotation is unequal to its main meaning. The connotation contains not only the general meaning but also connotative meaning of culture. It is related to many factors,such as social background, emotions and attitudes of people and so on.There are many scholors make comparison of color terms between different cultures, for example, Shao Zhihong put stresses on the culture connotation between Chinese and English in the book The contrast of English and Chinese Color Terms. Zhang Peiji’s The Use and Translation of Color Terms in English and Chinese pays more attention to the translation of color terms in terms of culture.