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I. Introduction
The language plays a vital role in the development of human’s history, making it possible for us to communicate with each other. The language is the carrier of culture, while the idiom is the essence of language. The term “idiom” originated from the Greek word “idioma”, referring to the conventional language entities in the formation and development of the language with relative stability and the special significance. However, in terms of many differences between English and Chinese in linguistic features, cultural background and thinking modes, the fact that idioms cannot be truthfully translated is inevitable.
Translation is a rendering from one language into another. The key to idiomatic translation is to ensure the effectiveness of the passed information of the source language. This means that the target language must reflect the cultural connotation such as the contained images and figurative meanings. And the cultural image actually refers to a cultural symbol which crystallizes the national history, culture and wisdom. Yet, due to different living environments and cultural traditions, each ethnic group often forms its unique cultural image. But for the restricted cultural translatability, it is entirely impossible for the translator to get the idiomatic translation’s complete equivalence. However, many coincidences, namely cultural common core, exist among people in different cultures in understanding of the objective world and the description of natural phenomena. Compared with the quantity of untranslatability for the cultural differences, national cultural common core occupies minority. It’s very crucial to successfully transforming cultural images in the English and Chinese idiomatic translation. So we should take the appropriate translation methods to deal with the cultural image in idiom. And the paper discusses the problem of the transformation of cultural images in idiom translation from the perspective of practical view on translation.
II. Cultural Image transformation
The intention of this part is to explain what is cultural image and four categories about the referential meaning and connotative meaning in cultural image.
2.1 Cultural Image
Webster’s Encyclopedic Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language (Yerks, 955) gives the definition of the image as the following “to picture or represent in the mind, imagine and conceptive; a mental representation, idea and conception; a figure of speech esp. a metaphor or a simile and so on.” Cultural image refers to typical image with specific cultural connotation that is rooted in cultural soil. They have distinctive national nature in history and region, which are specific embodiments of national nature. Every culture has been formed through the sediment of social life in particular historical environment, and historical allusion embodies important contents of historical every effort to convey their ideas, meanwhile, a problem which many translation theorists sedulously explore and hope to solve in theory and reality. Nida Eugene A. says “Idioms usually carry more impact than non-idiomatic expressions because of their close identification with a particular language and culture” (28). Understanding of a language requires understanding of its idioms.
2.2 Four Categories about the Referential Meaning and the Connotative Meaning in Cultural Image