Abstract:

Color terms are widely used in our daily life.They are not only used to express people’s emotions but also endowed with rich cultural associations. Both Chinese and English are rich in the words denoting different colors which involve different cultural meanings. People from different cultures are very likely to understand the same color in various ways. Colors in different cultural backgrounds show different connotations and there are plenty ways to translate them. Based on these differences , this paper intends to make a general study on the extended meanings of color terms in English and Chinese and several translation skills which could be applied flexibly in translating color terms, such as literal translation, free translation and free translation plus annotation. In order to make the target language right and acceptable, it is important for translators to take the extended meanings into consideration in translation of color terms.

Keywords: color terms; extended meanings; translation skills

摘  要：

颜色词在我们日常生活中十分常见，不仅可以表述人们的情绪还与文化息息相关。中英文中都包含丰富的颜色词，它们有着不同的文化意义。而正因为不同文化中的颜色词显示不同的内涵且翻译方式多种多样，来自不同文化背景的人们很可能对同一种颜色有着各自不同的理解。基于这种不同，本文旨在通过对颜色词在中英文中的引申义的理解浅析直译法、意译法以及直译加注释等翻译方法在颜色词翻译中的运用。因而在颜色词的翻译中，为了使译文更为准确且易于接受，兼顾其蕴含的引申义是十分必要的。

关键词：颜色词；引申义；翻译方法

1. Introduction
Color words are widely used in our daily life. They are used to describe the colors of all kinds of things. People started to communicate through the basic meaning of color terms and then gradually created a lot of phrases with various associative meanings. As part of the basic vocabulary in English, color words have a special significance.
Color terms are endowed with rich emotional elements and cultural connotations. The conceptual meaning conveyed by color words is roughly the same in English and Chinese, but the same terms of color in these two languages may have different cultural associations. Being a group of culture-loaded words, not only can they reflect the objective world but also can they reflect cultural diversities.