One of the most remarkable, but at the same time difficult parts of learning any foreign language is the study of sayings, proverbs and various well-known expressions, which often add zest to the speech, and put the speaker as a connoisseur of the language.
But which of the sayings can be easily remembered and applied in colloquial speech?
The difference between proverbs and sayings
First, before approaching the study of the folklore elements of a language, it is worth understanding the terminology itself.
For English-speaking people, there is no difference between the words “proverb” and “proverb”. For Russians, the proverb denotes a complete sentence (phraseological unit or idiom), often containing some kind of folk wisdom, while a proverb means that a Russian-speaking simply means a phrase or a colorful expression ("big shot!").
It is worth noting that sayings are often identified with idioms, although this is not correct. A saying is just a phrase, not a sentence. And the idiom is an indivisible phraseological unit. The only thing that is common between them is that they cannot be translated into in. tongue.
The main difficulty in studying foreign proverbs, sayings and idioms is that they cannot be logically remembered, because idioms often fail to be divided into components without losing their general meaning. The same thing happens in the Russian language: expressions easily understood by Russian people, such as “beat the buck, ” or “after the sleeves” in translation will be completely incomprehensible to an American, an Australian, or any English-speaking person.
So, the English "To show the white feather" (Rus. "Show the white feather") will not make sense either in English or in Russian, if you display each of the values of the components of this expression.
The only option for memorizing any proverbs and sayings is cramming. If it is required to translate a foreign expression into another language, without losing the author's expressiveness, the translator tries to find the corresponding idiom or proverb in the language into which the translation is carried out.
