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The Characteristics Of Four-Character Chinese Idioms

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2. The characteristics of Four-character Chinese idioms The characteristics of Four-character Chinese idioms embodies many characteristics of Chinese culture itself, such as the form of duality(偶对思维), concretization(具象思维), and showing respect to the ancestors(尚古思维).

2.1 The form of duality
The Chinese people showed special preference to the form of duality and changed it into the strong pursuit of symmetry beauty from of old. The logo symbolized ‘two’(二) in Oracle's(3100--3400 years before today) shows the positive and negative aspects of one matter. In Chinese Eight Diagrams(八卦), all the elements—the heaven and the earth; the wind and the thunder; the mountains and the lakes; the water and the fire—are in pairs.
Affected by this, we can …show more content…

This part can be divided into another three parts: the Equivalence Theory; the Domestication and Foreignization Theory and the Skopos Theory.

3.1 The equivalence theory
This theory was put forward by Eugene A. Nida(1914-2011). It is one of the most influential translation thoughts and theories in translation circles over the decades. Nida pointed out that the aim of translation should keep to reproduce the intention meaning of the original, rather than reproducing the actual words of the original. The theories tally with the translation requirements of Four-character Chinese idioms.
One Chinese idiom in concretization “洁白如雪” can be translated into English “as white as snow”. But in the process of cross-cultural translation practices such coincidence is rare to find. Most of the idioms in concretization should be translated according to the equivalence theory.
For some examples:
“穷兵黩武” can be translated into English “adopt a war like

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