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Abstract: The goal of this graduation thesis is to find out the similarities in the use of character and appearance idioms in English and Slovene. Idioms represent an important part of the vocabulary of a language and the English and the Slovene language are not an exception. An idiom is a fixed word combination, consisting of at least two words. Its meaning is non-literal, i.e. it cannot be predicted from the individual meaning of the words it consists of. Therefore, idioms can represent a problem for translators. They are widely used, especially in informal, spoken language. I collected 150 character and appearance idioms and classified them into four groups according to the way they are translated into Slovene. The results of the analysis have shown that only approximately a quarter of the idioms have the same structure and meaning in English and Slovene. One third of the idioms have a different structure but share the same meaning. Almost half of the English idioms have no established Slovene translation at all or have no equivalent idiomatic translation. There are several reasons for the differences in the use of idioms between these two languages. The most important ones are culture, religion, history and the geographical distance. In my graduation thesis I was also interested in the similarities in the use of character and appearance idioms in different genres in English and Slovene. For this purpose I randomly selected 5 idioms from each group of idioms which have the same structure and meaning in both languages and researched their use in the corpuses COCA and FidaPLUS.
Keywords: idiom, character and appearance, translation, cultural differences, non-literal meaning
Published in DKUM: 20.10.2015; Views: 2815; Downloads: 185
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