从动物比喻看中西文化差异_英语论文

Cultural Differences Reflected through Animal Metaphors in Chinese and English

摘要

在人类历史进程中,动物与人类有着非常紧密的联系。一方面，人们常常将自己的情感与体悟寄托于动物来表达；另一方面，同一动物在不同的文化背景中因寓意不一从而形成不同的民族特色。它不仅对人类的生存与发展产生了深刻的影响，而且在人类文化发展史中发挥着不可替代的作用。在人类文化长河里，每个民族在缓慢的进程中逐渐形成本民族所特有的习俗、宗教以及文化，正是由于每个民族的不同才形成了丰富多彩的文化版图，而各文化所表现出来的差异是不容忽视的。可能一个单词在汉语中表示褒义，而在英语中却是贬义的意思，又或者英语中蕴义丰富的词在中文里并没有独特之处。通过对比英汉习语中动物比喻的差别之处，能够详细地了解中西方的文化差异，了解词汇的文化信息，扫除因文化差异不同而带来的交流盲区抑或是克服交流过程中的障碍，从而帮助人们更加顺利恰当地进行跨文化的交流和交融。

关键词：动物比喻，习语，文化差异，跨文化交流

Abstract

Historically, animals are intimately linked with human. On one hand, people often show their emotions and connect on animals; On the other hand, the same animal in different cultural background may have different meaning because of the different ethnic characteristics. It not only has profound effect on human survival and development, but also has a crucial role in the history of human culture. Every nation has gradually developed its special and unique customs, religion and culture. It is the difference between each nation that has formed rich and colorful cultural landscape, and the difference of the culture is not allowed to ignore. It is common that a word has good meaning in Chinese but express the opposite meaning in English. Another case is that a word may have rich and colorful meaning in Chinese, but show no unique feature in English. By comparing the difference of Animal metaphors existing in English and Chinese, we can have a detailed knowledge of the Chinese and western cultural differences, know the cultural information of vocabulary and eliminate blind communication which is resulted by cultural differences or overcome obstacles existed in communication so as to help people have more smoothly cross-cultural communication and blend properly.

Key Words: animal metaphors, idioms, cultural difference, cross-cultural communication.