Abstract:

Idioms are an important part of language. They are the products of the human society and carry a nation’s civilization. Those set phrases and expressions are so concise, vivid and even humorous. They play a very important part in people’s daily life and reflect the  history, geography, religion, customs , people’s thinking methods and other cultural elements of a certain nation. In order to enable readers to understand the differences and similarities between Chinese idioms and English idioms and do the better idioms translation, this paper will compare the Chinese idioms and English idioms in living environment, custom, religion, allusion and  acknowledge of objective things, to see the differences. This paper consists of five parts. The first part gives an introduction to the paper. The second part expresses the definition and expounds origins of English and Chinese idioms. The third part discusses the cultural differences reflected in English and Chinese idioms. The forth part tells the ways of translation. In the end, there is a conclusion about the paper.

Keywords: idioms；culture；translation；method

摘  要：

作为语言的一个重要部分，习语是一种人类社会的产物，承载着一个民族的文明，是一种广为流传的具有特定含义的固定的短语。习语常常在生活中被用到，并且在人们的生活中有着非常重要的影响。习语的文字通俗简练，形象生动，风趣幽默。它体现了一个民族在历史、地理、宗教信仰、风俗习惯和思维方式等等方面的特征，在人们的日常生活中起着非常重要的作用。为了使读者能够理解并且更好地做好习语的翻译，本文将从五个方面论述习语所反映的中西方文化差异，即生存环境、生活习俗、宗教信仰、历史典故以及对客观事物的认知。本文包含五个部分。第一部分是对该篇论文的简介。第二部分阐述习语的定义和起源。第三部分讨论了习语所反映的中西方文化差异。第四部分则介绍了几种习语翻译的方法。最后部分是论文的结论，对该篇论文进行简要的总结。

关键词：习语；文化；翻译；方法

1 Introduction
Idioms are the fixed phrases to express the human wisdom and experiences, so they are part of human civilization. People like to use idioms in their daily life and they contain the strong national characters and voices. After the prolonged history, they are used to express many things in people’s life and like a mirror, they truly reflect a nation’s culture.
A very important function of idioms is for the didactic purpose in any language. Generally, a figure of speech such as simile or allusion is used in an idiom to make it vivid and easy to be understood. Different nations have their different kinds of lifestyle and social environments. So they could use different similes to express the same meaning.