Abstract: Colors decorate the world and enrich the languages and cultures as well. Due to different cultural backgrounds including geographical environment and religious beliefs and different language expressions, the different understandings of colors by different nations endow colors with different cultural connotations. As an important part of language, color words could well reflect the cultural differences. This paper chooses the four basic color terms (red, white, yellow and black) as examples to make a comparative study of the different cultural connotations between Chinese and English color words, and tries to dig out the cultural factors behind these differences. This research also hopes to help people learn more about differences between Chinese and Western cultures so as to make a successful cross-cultural exchange.
Key Words: color words; differences; cultural connation; cultural factor

摘要：颜色使世界变得丰富多彩，也使各民族的语言文化更加丰富。不同国家由于其地理环境，宗教信仰等文化背景以及语言表达方式的差异，人们对颜色的认知及赋予它们的文化内涵也不尽相同。作为语言的重要组成部分，颜色词在一定程度上反映了不同文化之间的差异。本文以红、白、黄、黑四种生活中最常见的典型色彩为例，对比英汉两种语言中颜色词的文化内涵差异，并探讨这些差异背后深层的文化因素，帮助人们更多地了解中西方文化差异，促进跨文化交流的顺利进行。
关键词：颜色词；差异；文化内涵；文化因素

With the development of economy and society, cultural exchanges between China and western countries become deeper and deeper. More and more people begin to realize the importance of a successful cross-cultural communication. There is an urgent need to obtain a clear understanding of the differences in languages and in culture. Studies on these differences have been done for a long time and cover a lot of different linguistic and cultural phenomenon. Color words, as a part and parcel of the language, carry rich cultural meaning and have aroused wide attention.
Color is closely related to human life, contains a lot of cultural connotations. Under different cultural environments, there come many discrepancies between different nations on colors, sometimes even totally opposite. Different countries have different languages and they also have diverse expressions for the same color word. Through the window of language, people can find some interesting phenomenon due to the differences between Chinese and western cultures.