摘  要

随着全球化的发展，不同国家的文化，尤其是像英国和美国这些大国的文化已经逐渐地渗透到我们的日常生活当中。西方文化对东方的巨大影响，毫无疑问已成为事实。因此，现在有很多人选择从风俗、颜色、器官和文学作品等等这些不同的角度入手来研究文化之间的差异。
正如王颖在2007年所提到的“习语无处不在”，我们的日常生活中有很大一部分对话就是用习语构成的，他们来自于人们对自然语言的自然运用。习语反映了人们构建世界理念、生动地传递理念的新方法。人们喜爱其深刻、智慧、完美和风味。因此，本文将从讨论动物习语入手，对比分析在不同领域的内涵展现出的中英文化的差异，以便人们更好地掌握动物习语在跨文化交际中的功能，帮助人们理解和沟通。
   
关键词：全球化；文化差异；动物习语；跨文化交际

Abstract

With the development of globalization, there is no doubt that a great variety of cultures that come from different countries, especially like from those great countries such as America and England, have increasingly immersed into our daily life. It is a fact that the western culture has exerted a profound influence upon the Eastern culture. So nowadays there are a lot of people beginning to study their cultural differences from the perspectives of customs, colors, organs, and literary works and so on.
As Wang Ying (2007) claimed that idioms were pervasive, a large part of our daily-life conversation is formed by idioms. They come arise in the natural use of natural language. The creation of idioms reflects new ways in which individuals construct concepts of the world and convey them vividly. People enjoy them for their incisiveness, their frequent wit, their polish, and their savor. So familiarity with a wide range of idioms and the ability to use them appropriately in context that is among the distinguishing marks of the cultural diversity or difference.
As a consequence, this paper will begin its discussion with different animal idioms to show the diversities between Chinese and English culture through contrasting the connotation in various areas. In order to make people know the function that animal idioms are used in cross-cultural communication, can also make people communicate with others that from different cultures more exactly and understandably.

Key words: globalization; cultural differences; animal idioms; cross-cultural communication

1 Introduction
Ever since the birth of human civilization, animal images, which are closely connected with human being’s daily life, are not only invading into human’s linguistic world, but also gradually forming various cultural connotations. Animal idioms are the mirrors of the cultural diversities and usually contain different cultural connotations which associations sometimes are quite surprising. So it is very important to analyze the cultural diversities in different countries. The paper will set a sight from the angle---the idiom which contains animal words both in English and Chinese, to show the different cultures behind them and the different values by these idioms. So having an adequate knowledge of the cultural background of animal idioms is of great necessity in the comparison of English and Chinese animal idioms and also in the exploration of their cultural differences.