Jakobson(1959) thinks “Any acknowledged experience and its sorts can be expressed in every existing language。” In other words, he thinks languages have same, equal capability of expressing, if there appears vocabulary vacancy in a language, people could modify and develop the words by borrowing words, creating new words and many other ways。 This is a sign of translatability。 According to Zhang and Lou’s research, languages has three kinds of functions, first, to express acknowledged experience, second, to convey culture, third, to express aesthetic meanings。 The first function determined language’s translatability, the second function decided that language is partly translatable, the second function determined the untranslatability of language。 Under specific conditions, the untranslatability of CE and EC idioms’ translation could be inverted into translatability。 As Wang Bin’s research in 2013 pointed out, there’s some of effective translating tactics: looking for the same or the similar ways of expressing in the target language, which means literal translation or free translation; abandon visualized images and look for equal context meanings which means many other translating techniques such as transliteration; to use the source language and to substitute, which means substitution; add notes; and so on。 

These researches all pointed out that there are untranslatability and translatability in languages’ translation。 Many causes led to the result that there exists untranslatability in EC and CE translation, linguistically and culturally, especially when idioms are classic representation of culture。 However, although this was a fact, untranslatability still could be transferred into translatability by using some translating tactics。

2 The idioms' untranslatability's origin

    According to Deng Li’s research (2010), there are four aspects in the idioms’ untranslatability’s origin。 They are pronunciation’s untranslatability, characteristic features’ untranslatability, syntactic structure’s untranslatability and rhetoric’s untranslatability。 文献综述

2。1 Pronunciation's untranslatability

English and Chinese belongs to different linguistic systems and has different systems of pronunciation。 Therefore, some phenomenon of pronunciation doesn’t have a same form in the other language, which is the first origin of their idioms’ untranslatability。 For instance, an English sentence, “Cat, cat,cat, catch the fat rat fast。” if we translate it as Chinese “猫，猫，猫，快抓住那只肥老鼠”, we only translated its literal meaning, but lost the sense of hurry, urge, and being easy to read that the pronunciational effect expressed in the source language。

2。2 Characteristic features' untranslatability

    Chinese was constituted by characters while English was constituted by letters。 They were largely different in writing, therefore their characteristic features cannot be translated into the other language。 For instance, there is an Chinese idiom that were rooted in a traditional poem, “醉翁之意不在酒，在乎山水之间也”, which were borrowed to express the meaning of someone’s true desire was not one thing, but the other things。 When people translated this idiom into English, it becomes “Many kiss the baby for the nurse’s sake。” Although the English translation was correct in meaning, the original characteristic features such as the poems’ form that each line was consists of seven characters and the pronunciational features such as “平” and “仄” were ignored。

2。3 Syntactic structure's untranslatability

    English is a kind of inflecting language while Chinese is a kind of analytic language, English has formal change while Chinese has not。 English mostly goes with grammatical rules while Chinese mostly goes with logical rules such as rules of time order, therefore, in their idioms’ translation, especially the translation of English subordinate clauses, we cannot achieve equivalence。 For instance, a Chinese idiom “一个萝卜一个坑”, we can translate it into English as “We are so busy that no one can be spared for any other work”, which means one person can and can only has a specific job or position。 However, although we successfully translated this idiom and expressed its main meaning, we didn’t achieve syntactic structure’s equivalence in the translation。