Report On The E-C Translation Of Acquired Tastes:Stories About The Origins Of Modern Food(Excerpt)

Diet has always been the basic condition for human survival.With social development,it combines with various factors such as science,trade,politics to gradually develop into a colorful food culture.However,in China,study of western food culture is relatively not comprehensive,and there is still much room for improvement in the research on English-Chinese translation of such texts from the perspective of relevant theories.The source text of this translation practice is excerpted from Acquired Tastes:Stories about the Origins of Modern Food,which introduces typical western foods as examples to show western food culture and has the characteristics of both informative texts and expressive texts.This report uses Peter Newmark’s semantic and communicative translation theory as the framework and selects some typical cases from the lexical,syntactic and textual levels for in-depth analysis.It is found that the translation difficulties caused by the language differences mainly include parenthesis,complex clauses,coherence and cohesion.For these,various methods such as additions,omissions,adjusting word order,conversion of word,and logical reorganization can be helpful to achieve objective accuracy and beautiful coherence.And the translation problems caused by the food cultures differences like technical terminology and culture specific terms can be mainly solved by supplementing explanations or adding notes.This translation practice,to a certain extent,can enrich the research perspective of the English-Chinese translation process analysis of the source text,broaden the interpretation range of semantic and communicative translation theory,and provide some references for other food culture text translation practices.Meanwhile,this practice help readers obtain more information,and promote the mutual enlightenment and better development of both Chinese and Western food culture.