Essay On Old English Idioms

The aim of the present paper is to analyse idioms related to human body parts in English and Romanian from a semantic and syntactic perspective and the translational principles used in translating them. Idioms have been universally introduced in all languages in a natural way, according to several significant factors: linguistic, cultural, historical, etc. Their spreading has always been “by word of mouth”, i.e. through the traditional oral path and by way of written documents, either in a source language only, or both in a source language and target language form. The translated documents (target language texts) will be the basic reference in the present paper, on account of the relative (un) translatability of idioms.

Idioms are difficult to translate because there are specific differences related to the cultural background of languages. An expression such as “to be the apple of one’s eye”, which is translated as “a fi lumina ochilor cuiva” preserves its idiomatic meaning – to love someone dearly. In Old English, the expression “apple of one’s eye” referred to „the pupil of the eye, considered to be a globular solid body; it came to be used as a symbol of something cherished”.

English idioms denoting body parts are rather numerous if we take into consideration the

When translating idioms, it is important to find an equivalent so that the meaning can be transferred from the source language to the target language while still preserving the idiomatic nature of the language. Theoreticians believe that it is hard to find an absolute equivalent in the target language (Williams 2013, Armstrong 2005, Bassnet 2002), however, a translator has to find the appropriate level of equivalence. Sometimes, idioms cannot be translated using this method of equivalence (when no idiomatic counterpart is found), therefore the last resort should be the literal translation or the paraphrase of the