老鼠过街,人人喊打
When a rat runs across the street everybody cries, "kill it!"
In English, the word mouse doesn’t have so many negative meanings as the Chinese character 鼠does. At the very beginning, it was the symbol of timid and weakness, which has the same cultural connotation with that in Chinese. In modern cartoon films, mouse is the brave fighter to defeat the cat.
From the folk, we can see how shrewd the mouse is in human beings’ mind. On the other hand, mouse lives in obscure corner to secretly eat people’s food. So the word mouse is always associated with derogatory sense, such as timid, suspicious, and narrow-minded.
As a part of culture, language is the carrier, the accumulation, and reflection of culture in the mean time. Language and the cultural information it contained show people the nation’s culture background. It can well be perceived by the comparative study of the Animal Signs’ cultural connotation in Chinese and English.