英语论文网

warm and comfortable season, which is usually linked with ‘lovely’, ‘gentle’ and ‘nice’. Shakespeare compare thee to a summer in one of his poems, ‘shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate’” [11] So different living surroundings may produce different idioms in different language and different culture. 3.2 Different cognitions of things Because of the differences between eastern and western cultures, people have greatly different cognitions of things, and this exerts a great influence on the differences of the outcome of both Chinese and English idioms. 3.2.1 Different cognitions of animals English and Chinese belong to two different language families. Chinese belongs to the Han-Tibetan language family. Being limited to the living conditions, climate and so on, several animals find the same environment on which they rely for existence as the human being. These animals and the human beings are interdependent. While the man are the most emotional animals that give the animals different affection, as a result, the symbolic meaning of the animals vary greatly. The cattle had once done great contributions to Chinese agriculture in history, so there emerged idioms concerning this animal, such as “力大如牛”，“倔犟如牛”，“鞭打快牛”，etc. For the English, horse is used as an important tool whose merits and contributions are outstanding. Consequently, there are equivalent idioms having the same meaning as Chinese idioms in English, such as “as strong as a horse”, “as stubborn as a mule” and “The horse that draws best is most whipped.” Besides, the British advocate horsemanship. They like raising horses and holding horse-races. Thus there are a great number of idioms concerning horse, such as: “dark horse”, “eat like a horse”, “bet on the wrong horse”, “change horse in mid-stream”, “hold one’s horse”, etc. In western culture, the cunning fox specially likes eating the goose surreptitiously. If leaving the fox to look after the geese alone, wouldn’t it mean looking for trouble? We have no such knowledge in Chinese. Thereby, the English idiom “set a fox to keep one’s geese”（让狐狸看鹅）would be quite baffling to the Chinese. But there is an identical idiom in Chinese ——“引狼入室”which means the same thing as “set a fox to keep one’s geese”. Both of the two idioms are translated correspondingly and vividly. It is worth mentioning that, in Chinese’s eyes, tiger is the king of wild animals. It has rich cultural symbolized meaning, including the commendatory connotation, such as valor, grandeur and might, as well as the derogatory connotation of cruelty, savageness and ferociousness. While in English culture, lion is the king of all animals, consequently, there are obviously much more English idioms concerning lion than the Chinese idioms concerning tiger, so that “we often translate lion into ‘虎’ in English translation, such as ‘a lion in the way’(拦路虎), ‘place oneself in the lion’s mouth’(深入虎穴)”,etc.[12] 3.2.2 Different cognitions of colors There are three kinds of basic colors: red, yellow and blue. Colors are cognized mainly through the seven kinds of colors: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and purple in the spectrum. Due to the different countries’ historical backgrounds, geographical locations, customs and traditions, people have diverse cognitions of colors, so the idioms rising under the conditions reflect such regional differences. Taking “red” and “white” for example, in western countries, red is regarde