III 1.2 “DRAGON” WESTERN CULTURE
Nowadays, most of the mainstream media in China, when they do the translation, they would like to refer the Chinese character “long” to the English word “dragon”. In fact, “dragon” was considered to one kind of scaly green monster (a large and usually ferocious fire-breathing creature in myths, legends, and fairy tales that has green scaly skin, a long tail, and wings) symbolizing destruction and evil, in western people’s mind. This conception is found, for example, in Enuma Elish, a Mesopotamian creation epic written about 2000 BC. One of the central figures of the legend is the goddess Tiamat, a dragon like personification of the oceans, who headed the hordes of chaos and whose destruction was prerequisite to an orderly universe. In the sacred writings of the ancient Hebrews, the dragon frequently represents death and evil[1]. We also can see it from Bible: Satan was called “dragon”. In some of the Christian art, the dragon is a symbol of sin. Culture is the content of the language. We cannot separate the language from its original culture of history. Also in Greek Mythology, we have heard the story of Cadmus .He is the son of King of Phoenicia. After Cadmus killed a dragon, he put the dragon teeth into the field. And then the teeth turned into the warriors running from the ground, wanting to kill Cadmus. So now, we have an expression called: sow dragon’s teeth. It means sowing the seeds of hatred and enmity.
We also can find out some expressions with derogatory sense in the dictionaries. For example, “She is a real dragon.” Here, “dragon” refers to an unfriendly and frightening woman. Form the following description from A New English Course（a famous English Textbook in China）, we can also find out the how the westerners fell when mentioning this word: “Suddenly his eyeballs (an old lizard’s eyeballs) reddened. A final fast lunge from my friend at the beast and I (the writer) froze in astonishment---a fine spray of blood shot from the lizard’s eye, like fire from a dragon!”
Article From: http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/3f6e88c40100047c www.loong.cn
