Idiom

An idiom is a variety of phraseological unit with the highest degree of semantic fusion, whose meaning is not derived at all from the meanings of its components and often cannot be translated literally into another language. Idiomaticity — the property of an expression to be an indivisible semantic whole — is inherent in every language and closely linked to its national specificity and the figurative thinking of the people. In literature idioms lend speech authenticity, aptness, emotional saturation and national colour. Because of their literal untranslatability, idioms present a particular difficulty for translators, who must seek equivalent counterparts in the target language. Idioms are the central object of phraseology and an important subject of contrastive linguistics and translation theory.