A comparative study of English and Chinese color words 汉英色彩词对比研究.docVIP

A comparative study of English and Chinese color words 汉英色彩词对比研究 【关键词】汉英；色彩词；文化；翻译 I. IntroductionThe color is a kind of human being’s aesthesia in the objective world. Various colors exist in the colorful world: blue sky, green trees, red flowers and white clouds. Color connects with our life closely and it is an important way for us to realize this world. Color words not only have physical properties but also have rich cultural connotations. Cultural connotation means vocabulary is endowed with the meaning of metaphor, association, symbol etc. In different countries, color words of cultural connotations are different. So the same color may have the different meaning in English and Chinese, because of the different history and culture. When one kind of colors has different meanings in different cultures, we can’t say which kind of linguistic expression is more reasonable, more exact and better to use. So a comparative study of English and Chinese color words is very important to understand English and Chinese language, culture and cross-cultural communication and the Chinese- English Corresponding Relationship and the Strategies for English-Chinese Translation of Color Words.II. The Cultural Differences between Chinese and English Color WordsA. The Definition and Concept of Color WordsThere are plenty of color words in both English and Chinese. Definitely, color words are words to describe the color of things in languages. The physiological response that the color causes as human vision has some characteristics in common. After the research on more than 100 languages, some scholar found that every language has a certain number of color words. Linguists Berlin and Kay(1969) suggests that there are eleven basic color words in English after his detailed research, they are white, black, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, purple, orange, pink, and grey.Also the color terms can be classified as basic color terms and object color terms. Basic color terms mean?“words us