英语论文网

refers to “an idea, institution, etc that many think should not be criticized”(神圣不可侵犯的思想, 机构, 制度等). Other examples are “white elephant” which refers to “a rare, expensive possession that is a financial burden to maintain”, “road-hog” which refers to “reckless or inconsiderate driver”, “the birds and the bees” which refers to “the basic facts about sex”. 2.1.5 Different Historical Cultures The vocabulary of any language is always gained in the process of the nation’s long history. Lexical gaps caused by historical cultures are prominently reflected by historical allusions, idioms and literary works. Among them, historical allusion is the representative of the characteristic of the historical culture. Actually, allusions in each language are always hard to communicate with other languages, because most of them contain a story behind, which can hardly be translated in only a few words (see 吴燮元1998). In china, historica l allusions are always related to idioms, which are the treasures of Chinese vocabulary. Examples of lexical gaps can be easily found in this field, such as “东施效颦”, “亡羊补牢”, “班门弄斧”, “画蛇添足”, “三个臭皮匠顶个诸葛亮”, etc. (Net. 2) 2.2 Linguistic Differences Linguistics is a general term for language study (see Catford 1965:23). In the world, different nations have different languages, each of which has its own characters. On English and Chinese, Chinese is an ideographic language which focuses on visual analog, while English is a phonographic language which focuses on auditory experiences. As our concern is mainly about the formation of “lexical gap”, we mainly pay attention to the linguistic aspects as how language forming words and how the words acquire meanings. Different languages construct words with different mechanism, such as English usually form words through affixation, and accordingly has a whole set of affixes of considerable number; while Chinese words are usually constructed through compounding, whose few affixes have only limited ability of forming words or altering the words’ part of speeches. As a result, English can condense more meaning into a word by many times affixation, but Chinese words can hardly be compound over two times. At the same time, Chinese words are typical for the strong ability of abstracting, just like the thinking patterns of Chinese people, who like to contract complex thoughts into simple symbols, whereas English words embody the quality of specification, thus the many number phrase in Chinese are lexical gaps in English. Ⅲ Methods of Revolving the Problem of Lexical Gaps In the former two chapters, we have listed many examples of lexical gaps, of various kinds and of various causes. The translations of them have given us some hints of how to resolve this problem, and this chapter will sum up them into a systematic body. According to Nida (1964:12), a good translation is the version which makes the readers of the sources language and the target language have almost the same feeling. We mainly discuss four translation methods to get close to translation equivalence, which are transliteration, literal translation, liberal translation and transcription. 3.1 Transliteration As Mark (2004:175) wrote in his book “a type of transfer in which the form of the original sound is preserved unchanged in the target language.” Transliteration means the transmission of sounds of a foreign language (usually proper name, geographic name, scientific term) using the letters of the alphabet of