IDIOMS AND PROVERBS IN TRANSLATION AND INTERPRETATION:

A CULTURAL CHALLENGE
Azucena Puerta-Díaz, MA azucenapuerta@dslextreme.com
ATA Accredited Translator / Certified Court Interpreter, Judicial Council of California

PROVERB:
A short, memorable, and often highly condensed saying embodying, especially with bold
imagery, some commonplace fact of experience. (The Collins English Dictionary).
Proverbs usually express folk wisdom or advice. For example: Like father, like son

IDIOM:
A group of words whose meaning cannot be predicted from the meanings of the constituent
words, as for example: (It was raining) cats and dogs. (The Collins English Dictionary)

CHARACTERISTICS OF IDIOMS
Fixed structure (“Black and White” but not “White and Black” ) and indivisible meaning
(we cannot usually discover their meaning by looking up the individual words).
Idioms form a continuum from transparent to opaque based on what can be inferred from
their literal meaning.
 Transparent Idioms (e.g. “to see the light” = to understand)
 Semi-Transparent Idioms (e.g. “to break the ice” = relieve the tension
 Semi-Opaque Idioms (e.g. “to know the ropes” = to know how a particular job should be done)
 Opaque Idioms (e.g. “to kick the bucket” = to die)

CHARACTERISTICS OF PROVERBS
Syntactic features: proverbs are rhythmically structured in rhymes
Semantic features: they originate from people’s real life experience; they are produced by
people, in daily conversation, folklore, or literature; they usually have two layers of meanings:
literal and figurative; they are codes of behavior; they reflect people’s living conditions, working
environment, and life experience and ideology; and they are short in words but long in meaning.

Idioms and Proverbs in Translation and Interpretation 1

 SIMILARITIES AND DIFFERENCES BETWEEN IDIOMS AND PROVERBS
SIMILARITIES:
 They are products of human’s thought, cultures and processes of working and learning.
 They are mainly orally transmitted from generation to generation.
 Both are set-expressions with stable and fixed components.
 Their meaning cannot be interpreted by looking up the individual words in a dictionary.
DIFFERENCES:
 Their grammatical structure: While idioms are phrases, proverbs are complete sentences
or phrases expressing the whole idea.
 Their function: proverbs use metaphors to express judgments, give advice, and state a
general truth about life (they have a perceptive, educational, and aesthetic function),
while idioms only have an aesthetic function (express meaning in a picturesque way).

When translating proverbs and idioms, learn about the forms, contents, origins, functions and
figurative style of the idioms. Make sure you understand the meaning of the proverb/idiom in the
source language (collect idioms involving special keywords, and study their syntactic and
semantic usages in particular contexts; listen to educated native speakers and use different course
books, dictionaries and other resources to check the correctness of idioms). Also, make sure you
master your own language and culture.
Keep in mind that cultures share many similarities in proverbs and idioms, that come from the
process of word borrowing and cultural exchange throughout history, and also, from identical
political situations, geographical features, and historical development.

TECHNIQUES AND OPTIONS FOR TRANSLATING PROVERBS AND IDIOMS

 Omission. You may have to omit part of the dialogue due to character limitations, but that
is not an option we have in legal interpreting.
 Literal translation
 Translation of meaning through similar or different “images”, when there is a proverb in
the other language that conveys the same meaning, using images that are alike, relatable,
or different.
 Explanation or description

Idioms and Proverbs in Translation and Interpretation 2

 EXAMPLES

LITERAL TRANSLATION
Like water for chocolate (from Mexican Spanish proverb)
Meaning: really mad and sexually excited
English alternatives: Mad as hell / Hot and ready

EXPLANATION OR DESCRIPTION
When in Rome, do as the Romans (English)
Meaning: Behave as those around you
Enter house, follow customs (Vietnamese)
Move your neck according to the music (Ethiopian)
Wherever you go, do what you see (Spanish)

TRANSLATION OF MEANING WITH DIFFERENT IMAGES

Kick the bucket (English)
Meaning: To die
Stretch your paw (Spanish)
Stretch your hooves (Polish)
Break your head (French)

Piece of cake (English)

Meaning: Easy
Eaten bread (General Spanish)
To sew and to sing (Spain Spanish)
It’s completely cooked (French)
Peanuts (Tagalog)

TRANSLATION OF MEANING WITH SIMILAR (OR NOT SO SIMILAR) IMAGES

To pull someone’s leg (English)
Meaning: To joke
To pull or to take someone’s hair (Spanish)
To pay for somebody’s head (French)
To hoax (Polish)
Idioms and Proverbs in Translation and Interpretation 3
To go into the lion’s den (English)
Meaning: To go into a situation that puts you in great danger
To go into the wolf’s mouth (Spanish)
To jump into the wolf’s mouth (French)
A mouse that wants to die goes to sniff the cat’s nose (Ethiopian)

TRANSLATION OF MEANING WITH VERY DIFFERENT IMAGES

You snooze you lose
Meaning: The idea of missed opportunity
He who went to La Villa (a religious site in Mexico City), lost his chair (Spanish)
The sleeping shrimp is carried away by the current (Spanish)
He who goes hunting loses his spot (French)

To play innocent
Meaning: To act as if you didn’t do a thing
To play an innocent one (Polish)
Play the dead fly (Spanish)
Play Saint Don’t Touch (French)

Toot your own horn (English)

Meaning: To give yourself credit for something
To brag (Polish)
Not to have a grandmother (Spain Spanish)
To throw flowers on yourself (General Spanish)

CULTURAL SIMILARITIES/DIFFERENCES
When pigs fly (English)
Meaning: Impossibility, something that’s very unlikely to happen
When donkeys fly / When frogs grow hair (Spanish)
When the crow has turned white / When the stork has become black (Tagalog)

Out of the frying pan into the fire (English and Spanish)
Meaning: To escape a bad situation to get into a worse one
Avoid melon skin, then come across a coconut shell (Vietnamese)
Idioms and Proverbs in Translation and Interpretation 4
Scratch my back and I will scratch yours (English)
Meaning: If you do something for me, I will do something for you (reciprocity)
If I give you a ham you have to give me a bottle of wine (Vietnamese)
Today for me, tomorrow for you (Spanish)

It’s the last straw that breaks the camel’s back (English)
Meaning: The last of a series of annoyances or disappointments that leads one to a final loss of
patience, temper, trust, or hope
One more water drop will spill the glass (Vietnamese)
The drop that makes the cup overflow (Spanish)
The drop that makes the vase overflow (French)

You can’t make a silk purse from a sow’s ear (English)

Meaning: You can't make something good out of something that is naturally bad
A monkey dressed in silk is still a monkey (Spanish)
A cat may go to a monastery, but she still remains a cat (Ethiopian)
A piece of rotten wood cannot be turned into something beautiful (Vietnamese)

Your other / better half (English)

Meaning: Spouse or soul mate
The other half of the heart (Tagalog)
Your half orange (Spanish)

Between a rock and a hard place (English)

Meaning; in a very difficult position; facing a hard decision
Between the hammer and the anvil (Polish)
Between the sword and the wall (Spanish)
A bird hanging between two branches will get bitten on both wings (Ethiopian)

When the cat’s away the mice will play (English)

Meaning: When no one in authority is present, the subordinates can do as they please
When the cat goes away the mice have fun (Spanish)
When the owner is away from home, the chicken will peck the earthenware pot of shrimp
(Vietnamese)
Idioms and Proverbs in Translation and Interpretation 5
To put the cart in front of the horse (English)
Meaning: To have things in the wrong order
To start the house from the roof (Spanish)
To start from the end (Polish)

It’s raining cats and dogs (English)

Meaning: Raining hard
It pours from jugs (Spanish)
It pours as from a wooden pail (Polish)

His bark is worse than his bite (English)

Meaning: Not as unpleasant as he seems, not as bad as his threats
The lion is not as scary as it is depicted (Spanish
The devil is not as terrible as he’s depicted (Polish)

Idioms and Proverbs in Translation and Interpretation 6

ETHIOPIAN PROVERBS EQUIVALENTS

1. Clothes put on while running come off while running

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2. If you gladly stoop to the ground, don’t be surprised if they trample over you
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3. It is better to be the cub of a live jackal than of a dead lion

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4. Little by little, an egg will walk

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5. Singing “Hallelujah” everywhere does not prove piety

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6. The dog I bought bit me; the fire I kindled burned me

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7. The eye of the leopard is on the goat, and the eye of the goat is on the leaf
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8. The son of the Nile thirsts for water

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9. What one hopes for is always better than what one has
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10. When spiders unite, they can tie down a lion

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Idioms and Proverbs in Translation and Interpretation 7