3。1  Geographical Environments 11

3。2  Religions 12

3。3  Social Cultures 13

Chapter Four  Translation of Color Terms 15

4。1 Literal Translation 16

4。2 Free Translation 16

4。3 Substitution 17

Chapter Five  Conclusion 19

References 20

  On the Cultural Connotations of Color Terms in Chinese and English and Their Translations

Chapter One  Introduction

    It used to be one of the most contentious issues in linguistic study that what the relationships among language, society and culture are。 Language can’t exit without culture。 The language is not only a part of the culture, but the carrier and expressions of the culture。 We can understand the hidden culture connotation through the language。 Vocabulary, as the most active factor in language, can reflect the culture identity clearly。 The scholars in semantics pide the lexical meaning into linguistic meaning and culture meaning。 The linguistic meaning means the conceptual meaning, and the culture meaning contains the emotional colors, stylistic meaning and figurative senses。 And it always means the subjective assessments to an object of a certain culture group, and the different assessments will affect the cultural communication of the both sides。 论文网

Colors are closely related to our lives。 Every one of us deals with them every day。 It must be a pale world if we lost colors and we wouldn’t live happy and colorful lives, because colors can please our eyes and satisfy our hearts。 Scientifically speaking, the colors are just our visual effects to everything around us through our eyes and brains, which are based on our life experience。 There are many colors in our world。 Each of them has its distinctive physical attribute, and also has been vividly embodied in language。 In human languages, there are many symbols recording those colors which we call color terms。 These color terms are very emotional and posses s deep culture connotations。 In theory, as a result of senses, all people shall feel the same to a certain color。 But because of the different religion believes, geographical condition, mindset and so on, it can be found that the color terms have great differences in values, associative meaning and linguistic performance for the people from different culture reference。 In such cases, the same color term may have the completely opposite meanings especially in Chinese and English such two distinct culture systems。 

Russian painter, esthetician Kandinsky once said: "Color has a direct impact on the spirit"。 (Kandinsky，1912)Overseas researches on color words started earlier, including two kinds of views which have exerted great effects on Chinese color terms study。 One is Berlin and Kane's view that there are 11 basic colors。 The other is based on "linguistic relativity" (also known as the Sapir - Wolfe hypothesis)。

The research on color terms in China started late, mainly referring to the research results of the west, especially Berlin and Kane’s。 In 1964, Zhang Peiji published the book English Sensual Words and Translation, which is the foundation of the study on English color terms in our country。 In 1990, Liu Yunquan published the book The Color Beauty of Language, discussing the characteristics of Chinese color terms, evolution, rhetoric and its relationship with language, literature and social culture。 Since then many scholars and translators have published their research and discovery on the Chinese and Western color terms。