外国语六种颜色词语的英汉互译探索.doc

六种颜色词语的英汉互译探索

A Study of the Translation of Six Color Terms Between English and Chinese

舒 洪 成
Shu Hongcheng

攀枝花学院本科毕业论文 Contents

Under the Supervision of
Liao Hong

School of Foreign Languages and Cultures
Panzhihua University
May 2009

Contents

Abstract ……………………………………………………………………….……Ⅰ
Key Words …………………………………………………………………………Ⅰ
摘 要 …………………………………………………………………………………Ⅱ
关键词 ……………………………………………………………………………….Ⅱ
Introduction…………………………………………………………………………... 1
I. The Introduction of Color Terms …………………………………………………2
A. The Origins of Color Terms ………………………………………………2
B. The Relationship Between Color Terms and Culture ………………….3
Ⅱ. The Cultural Connotations of Six Color Terms in English and Chinese................... 5
A. Red ………………………………………………………………………………5
B. Yellow………………………………………………………………………… 6
C. Blue ……………………………………………………………………………..7
D. Green …………………………………………………………………………...8
E. White ……………………………………………………………………………9
F. Black …………………………………………………………………………..11
Ⅲ. Translation Devices of Six Color Terms ……………………………………..13
A. A Study from the Cultural Perspectives ……………………………..13
1. Functional Equivalence …………………………………………………….13
2. Cultural Equivalence ……………………………………………………….15
B. A Study from the Linguistic Perspectives ……………………………16
1. Literal Translation …………………………………………………………..16
2. Free Translation ……………………………………………………………..17
3. Literal Translation plus Annotation ………………………………………..18
Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………..20
Acknowledgements …………………………………………………………………21
Bibliography ………………………………………………………………………...22

Abstract

Language is the carrier of culture; culture is the soil for language, and translation is the bridge for cross-cultural communication. Since human being’s life, culture and civilization are closely connected with the colorful world, color terms play an important role in cross-cultural communication. Based on the analysis of the origin of six color terms and their relationship with culture, this thesis makes an illustration of the cultural connotations of six color terms in English and Chinese, making an exploration into the translation devices of color terms, aiming at improving the proficiency of translation and cross-cultural communication so as to avoid unnecessary cultural conflicts.

Key Words

color terms; cultural connotation; translation devices

Ⅰ

Ⅱ

摘 要

语言是文化的载体，文化是语言的土壤，翻译是跨文化交际的桥梁。人类的生活、文化与文明和五色斑斓的世界密切相关，因此颜色词在跨文化交际中起着极为重要的作用。本文在分析颜色词的起源及其与文化关系的基础上，阐明了六种颜色词语在英汉两种文化中的不同内涵，探讨了颜色词的翻译方法。本文旨在提高人们的翻译实践能力和跨文化交际的能力，以避免人们在跨文化交际中出现不必要的文化冲突。

关键词

颜色词；文化内涵；翻译方法

Introduction

Since people are living in a colorful world, people should pay much attention to the color terms’ translation so as not to make some unnecessary conflicts in cross-cultural communication.
This thesis consists of three parts, aiming at exploring the translation of six color terms between English and Chinese.
The first part makes an analysis of two aspects, the origin of six color terms, i.e. Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, White, Black, and the relationship between color terms and culture.
The second part illustrates the cultural connotations of six color terms in English and Chinese.
The third part makes an exploration into the translation devices concerning about color terms.
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I. The Introduction of Color Terms

Color terms are the words, set phrases or sentences which are abstracted from the political, economic, cultural and social life. They are particularly connected with people’s living environment and they convey different emotive and evaluative meaning in different nations. As thousands of years passed by, different color terms are provided with vivid images, profound implications and various associative meanings.
In both English and Chinese, color terms are generally divided into three categories: basic color terms, object color terms and color terms in shades. Basic color terms include seven kinds of color terms: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Indigo, Blue and Violet. Object color terms refer to those original colors of the objects in nature, and this category embraces such color terms as silver, gold, carnation, orange-red and blood-red. Color terms in shades are those colors with slight differences such as coal-black and pitch-dark, rose-red and China-red.
Color terms can mirror people’s customs and beliefs in different nations and regions, their thinking modes and so forth. It is easy to find out that a color term is closely linked with its culture. Therefore, to understand and explore the color terms’ translation should start from their origins.

A. The Origins of Color Terms
As for the origins of color terms, there are mainly five sources, i.e., history, visual images, literature works, economy, social customs and habits.
Since the ancient times, people had begun to adopt some color terms to express their feelings and emotions towards their living environment. Aristotle is a typical example. His Black and White Theory might be the earliest request for the color terms in history and he believed that color was made up of hue, luminosity and saturation. There are also other theories related to color terms such as Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Cognitive Linguistics.
Living in the colorful world, people must have different impressions on different kinds of colors. Colors are connected with people’s visual images. When colors are combined together, they can always produce an artistic and vivid effect. For example, “…on the river where the water-meadows are fresh and green, and the stream sparkles on among pleasant islands, murmuring weirs, and whispering rushes. 河边一片片的嫩草青翠欲滴，湍流在美丽的岛屿，水声潺潺的河堰和沙沙作响的苇草之间的河水银光闪闪。” (Wang Haitao, P291, 2004) Here in this sentence “fresh and green” is translated into “qingcuiyudi(青翠欲滴)” in Chinese. It indicates that “the grass along the river bank is so delicate and youthful looking”. In this way, the translation has well transplanted the grass’s growing state to a reader.
Literature is a kind of cultural heritage, a specific kind of culture which reflects a certain kind of value of a nation. Many classical literary works in different nations are invariably admired and digested by people all over the world. Therefore, the words and phrases and even sentences which contain color terms also have become a part of people’s life. Thomas Hardy, a great British novelist at the turn of the 19th century, used “steely” to describe “the starlight” and “yellow” to describe “candle light”, which successfully conveys the predicament and loneliness of Tess. Moreover, in Shelly’s famous poem Ode to the West Wind, the poet’s sad feelings and emotions can be understood through his adoption of some adjective color terms such as“yellow, black, pale and hectic red”.
Nowadays, economy has become the most dynamic factor in social life. With the fast development of science and technology, many items which contain colors have come into being. For example, “white goods” refers to “some specific electrical appliances whose color is white”.
Up till now, there are more than two hundred nations in the world, due to their unique social customs and habits, people in different nations have different habitual expressions of color terms. For example, “blue film” is rendered into “yellow film” in Chinese, for in Chinese the color term “yellow” includes an associative meaning as “pornographic”.

B. The Relationship Between Color Terms and Culture
Language is closely related to culture, so is color terms. Only when color terms are put under specific linguistic circumstances do they make sense. For example:
Excuse me, Sir. Could you show me your green card?
Translation 1: 打扰您一下，先生，能否给我看看你的绿卡？
Translation 2: 打扰您一下，先生，能否给我看看你的绿卡境外驾驶保险卡？ (Zhu Jifang, P139-140, 2004)
In “Translation 1”, “green card” is translated into its equivalence of “green card” (绿卡i.e., lvka) in Chinese, referring to “a certificate which guarantees a foreigner to inhabit in U.S. and which can allow him to find a job there”. In “Translation 2”, “green card” is rendered into “an insurance green card for driving abroad”(绿卡境外驾驶保险卡lvkajingwaijiashibaoxianka), meaning “an insurance card which is against an accident of a driver who drives his car in foreign countries”.
According to the different cultural connotation of “green card” in U.S. and Britain, one can decide which version is more suitable. This example illustrates that different nations have their own specific conceptions of the same color terms.
Color terms are of vital importance for human beings to recognize the world, and they not only serve as carriers of their own physical characteristics but also functions as a mirror reflecting their specific connotations in a nation. Therefore, when translating color terms, special attention should be paid to in order to convey the cultural connotations of color terms in the target language.

Ⅱ. The Cultural Connotations of Six Color Terms in English and Chinese

Chinese and English are two kinds of languages belonging to Sino-Tibetan and Indo-European families respectively. With their great discrepancies either in phonetics, grammars, or written forms, there exists a world between the two languages, whereas the Chinese and native English speakers have more or less similar or identical experiences and feelings in their daily life which makes possible the cross-cultural communication between China and English-speaking nations.
Those experiences and feelings were written down and recorded in various vocabularies, which include some concise and comprehensive color terms. These color terms contain some astonishing similarities in implications and the occasions in which they are used, even though these terms are from entirely different languages. However, there are also some dissimilarities or cultural blanks which exist in these color terms in English and Chinese. Therefore, it is necessary to study the cultural connotations of color terms. In this chapter, six color terms, i.e., Red, Yellow, Blue, Green, White and Black, are being discussed.

A. Red
The color term “red” is called chise, i.e., “hong(红)” in Chinese. According to some statistics, there are about fifty words to describe the color “red” in Chinese, but more than one hundred in English. In English, there are twenty one words to describe “red” with letter C as its beginning, i.e., cardinal, carmine, carmine lake, carminenette, carnation, carnelion, casinopink, Chinese red, chrome red, chrome scarlet, cinnabar, claret, cochineal, Congo rubine , copper red, coquelicot, cordo van, cresol red, cramoisie, crimson, crimson madder.
The color “red” means quite different for the Chinese and the British as well as the Americans. People in English-speaking countries regard “red” as blood-ness, anger, danger and violence. For them, they treat “green and golden yellow” as similar to the associative meanings of the color term “zhongguohong(中国红)”. Therefore, when translating some words or phrases containing “red”, it is necessary to make some adaptations to conform to the habitual expressions and tentative acceptance of the English-speaking countries. For example, “red mansions(红楼梦)” and “yihongyuan (怡红院)” are translated into English as “dream of golden days” and “green delights” respectively so as to reproduce the cultural connotation of the color term “red” in Chinese.
In Chinese, the emotive functions of the color term “red” can indicate excitement, shyness, anger, temptation, sympathy, beauty and a healthy state of a youth, and its symbolic meanings include prosperity and success, happiness and goodness. For instance, people in China use “hongbang(红榜)” to indicate “someone who does well in an exam or an interview”, and “hongshi(红事)” means “wedding”.
In China, colors usually carry strong political senses. The typical example is the color “red”. It symbolizes revolution, the proletariat, and the Chinese Socialism. However, the value of the color term “red” in English is quite contrary to that used in Chinese. For example:
Ex1: China’s Workers and Peasants’ Red Army中国工农红军 (Bao Huinan, P145, 2001)
Ex2: Red Army红军派, 红色军团 (指西德一恐怖集团) (Bao Huinan, P145, 2001)
Ex3: Red Brigades红色旅 (指意大利一极左派秘密恐怖组织) (Bao Huinan, P145, 2001)
“Red” in Ex1 is an appreciate word, and it refers to “the Chinese army which include workers and peasants in the liberation movement”. However, the color term “red” in Ex2 and Ex3 is a derogative word, and it refers to “the terrified factions in Western Germany and Italy accordingly”.

B. Yellow
Objectively speaking, in painting, the color “yellow” resumes people a kind of sense of warmth. But when it comes to the associative meanings of the color term “yellow”, in the native English-speaking countries, people tend to associate it with cowardly, closefisted and nasty, and here the color term “yellow” doesn’t indicate its object meaning as being translated into Chinese “huang（黄）”. Thus, the phrase “a yellow dog” can’t be literally translated into “huang gou（黄狗）” in Chinese. In fact, it means “a contemptible person”. In English, a notebook containing phone numbers can be expressed as Yellow Pages, for this kind of telephone directory is printed in yellow pages. And in France, “Yellow Book” represents the government report.
The Chinese tend to regard the color term “yellow” as a symbol of vulgar sense and degrading humanity, and it also indicates unlimited power in ancient times. Since Tang Dynasty, the color term “yellow” had become an exclusive color used for emperors and it was regarded as a symbol of being sacred and conventional. “Huangpaojiashen(黄袍加身)” implied that “one has been crowned as an emperor in ancient China”, and “hunagbang(黄榜)” or “huangmen（黄门）” were usually associated with glories.
People in China usually treat the pornographic literary and artistic works as “huangse dianying(黄色电影), huangse shukan(黄色书刊), huangse yinyue(黄色音乐)”, but “huang (i.e. yellow)”in these phrases have nothing to do with the meaning of the color term “yellow” used in English. In English the following words such as pornographic, filthy, vulgar, obscene can express the same associative meaning of “huang(黄)” used in Chinese and the native English speakers tend to use the color “blue” to indicate the equivalent associative meanings of the color term “ huang(黄)” used in modern Chinese. For instance, “blue jokes, blue revolution, and blue soft ware”.
There are some fixed phrases in Chinese containing “huang(黄)” which have nothing to do with the color term “yellow” used in English as well. For example, “huangdaojiri(黄道吉日)” in Chinese means “good luck”, “huangmaoyatou(黄毛丫头)” indicates “a silly little girl”, and “h