Coding colours: Differences across languages and their consequences for translation and language teaching

Abstract

The concept of colour occurs in every language of the world, but contrastive research shows that the names of individual colours, functioning in one of the compared languages, do not have unambiguous equivalents in the other. The problems of the linguistic expression of colours in different languages, the history of colour terms, the formation of the semantic field of colour names and the semantics of individual words referring to colours have been investigated by numerous scholars. This paper focuses on analysing the consequences of the different organisation of the semantic field of colour for the translation from one language into another, as well as for foreign language teaching. The consequences presented here concern Polish and German mainly, but other Indo-European languages are also taken into consideration.