ON TRANSLATING CAT AND DOG IDIOMS IN ENGLISH AND SERBIAN

Abstract

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to analyse feline (primarily cat) and canine idioms in English and Serbian phraseological dictionaries. Idioms are an integral part of any language, and therefore knowing them means being able to understand culture they come from and sound more natural like native speakers. Semantically speaking, they express a nation's perception of the inner and outer world surrounding it. For the importance they have in linguistic and cultural life of a nation they have been the focus of many studies in which they were primarily analysed in terms of their origin and expressive function. We believe that the analysis of the existing bilingual dictionaries will shed light on the problems translators sometimes face in this laborious process of idiom translation. One of the subsidiary purposes of this paper is to draw attention to 50 cat and dog idioms (36 animal idioms in Serbian and 14 in English) that haven't been transferred from the source to the target language yet.

Key words: dog idioms, cat idioms, translation.