Analysis of English idioms and proverbs

Analysis of English idioms and proverbs

I. Introduction

Each language has its own idioms and proverbs in the world. Generally, the history of a country is longer, the idioms and proverbs are richer. Idiom and proverb is a form of language to express people’s emotions and feelings in their daily lives; and is a short exact sentence or phrase from creating of people’s social practice; and is gradually the most concise and vivid part of language. With a Holland proverb said, “Proverbs are the daughters of daily experience.” It means idioms and proverbs are from people’s daily lives. Sometimes, a person who said a sentence as a proverb might be forgotten by others, but his sentence was still remained. In different nations, there are not only some points of similarity, but also a bit of difference on their forms of culture and lives.

The idiom is a kind of special speech form that is particular in meaning, grammatical structure and usage. Idiomatic expressions are even difficult for native English speakers because their meanings cannot be determined through an analysis of their individual words. For instance, “to fall out” means “to quarrel”, but neither “fall” nor “out” has a sense of quarrel. Another example is “a feather in one's cap”, which means “an honor or a success, of which one can be proud”. The meaning of this idiom is a metaphorical one. “Under the rose” is also very difficult to understand from the literal meanings of its component words. Its true meaning is “secretly”. “To have a bee in one's bonnet” means “to have a strange fixed idea about something”. “To kick the bucket or to bite the dust” means “to die”. The figurative interpretation of “shoot the breeze” is “to talk without purpose”. Unlike literal language, it is impossible to explain the idiom from the literal meaning of the individual words. Thus, English idioms are difficult to understand and acquire, because they are a combination of two or more words, which function as a unit of meaning. This is one of the most important characteristics of idioms and proverbs.

Bacon once said, “The genius, wit and spirit of a nation are discovered in its proverbs.”1 As we all know, language is closely related to culture and can be said as a part of culture. From a dynamic view, language and culture interact with each other and shape each other. Language is the carrier of culture which in turn is the content of language. We can dig out cultural features from language and explain language phenomena with culture. Idioms as a special form of language exist in both of them and carry a large amount of cultural information such as history, geography, religion, custom, nationality psychology, thought pattern and etc, and therefore are closely related to culture. They are the heritage of history and product of cultural evolvement. Consequently, we can know much about culture through studying idioms and in turn get better understanding of idioms by learning the cultural background behind them. So at first, we should recognize more about the culture before our translation. Then it can also offer us more information to help our translation.

For Chinese students, English idioms and proverbs is a stumbling block. It is very possible that they often not only feel at a loss in understanding conversations because of a key idiom but also misuse idioms. In this paper, I am going to make a study of the characteristics and translation of idioms and proverbs and throw some light on the learning of English idioms.