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they unavoidably carry cultural characteristics closely connected with a nation's history, economy, geography, religion, customs and mentality. These constitute the next characteristic of idioms, namely cultural loading. 4.2. The cultural loading Culture, in this paper, does not mean one's ability to read and write. It means, as the authoritative anthropologist Edward B.Tytlor wrote: “Culture or civilization taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society(1871)转引”[6] p14. People agree that culture has four basic characteristics: 1) It is learnt from society, not got from Heredity. 2) It is shared by all of a society, not just a few individuals. 3) It has the feature of symbol, and language is the most important symbolic system. 4) It is an integrated unit and each of them is related to others. In human history, the greatest impacts on national culture include the change of the earth's surface, the migration of the races, and the conquests, assimilations and wars between groups. To analyze the cultural peculiarities of idioms, it is necessary to briefly review the major events that influence the origination and development of the two languages. 5. Translation methods of idioms Translation is different from common communications. It involves a lot of factors, such as linguistic, cultural, psychological and art, etc. Therefore, it doesn't exclude the general rules, especially to the translators. After they finished the relevant inference and decision and began to do the code transformation, certain translation rules will avoid them from being blind. The important thing for them to pay much attention is to use the rules flexibly according to relevance principle. Techniques in translation vary, and we should use specific methods in treating specific problems, in another word, to find the optimal relevance. In the following sections, we shall discuss methods that can be used in dealing with specific idioms in translating from Chinese to English and vice versa, and try to analyze them in the light of relevance theory. Here are four main approaches. 5.1 The literal approach The Chinese and English languages are very different in their form and ways of expression on the one hand, and are similar in many respects on the other. To preserve the national character and the special coloring in the original work, and also accelerate the cultural exchange of the two nations, the first approach in idiom translation is the literal approach. It is used under the condition that the wording does not violate the rule of the target language. Take the Chinese idiom “雨后春笋”for example, we can borrow the English idiom "like mushroom" but the literal approach can also be used (if proper in the context) to translate it as "like bamboo shoots after a spring shower". Another example is “猫哭老鼠”.Though we can borrow the English idiom "to shed crocodile tears", we can also, and with better results, translate it as "the cat weeps over the mouse's death". Here, we introduce the image of "bamboo" to the English people, who will easily understand it, since pandas are becoming popular in the world now, and their food "bamboo" should also be well known to the people in the world. And the animals "cat" and “mouse", are also well known worldwide. The only problem is that the English-speaking people do not