Chinese Cooking Culture And Its Translation Based On Peter Newmark's Translation Theory

Dietary culture, which reflects each nation's cooking techniques and arts of food, witnesses and symbolizes a nation's ancient and elegant civilization. It also reflects the characteristics of a country's history and culture in its combination of material civilization and spiritual civilization. Chinese cooking culture is a vital part of Chinese dietary culture. Chinese cooking, broad and profound, of long standing and well established, which is developed and inherited by discarding the old ways and in favor of the new ones, is highly rated by its own distinct features: extensive selection of ingredients, consummate cooking techniques, unsurpassed cutting skills, scrupulous attention to the duration and degree of cooking and its exceptional food engraving arts and food arrangements. In the family of world dietary culture, Chinese cuisine and French cuisine are regarded as the greatest ones. It's even said that Chinese cuisine is the queen in the world. Chinese food attracts diners from all over the world for its various types, fragrance, pleasant tastes and reasonable nutrition composition.With the development of international communication, Chinese diet which is rich in historical and cultural elements should be spread throughout the world. Translators are duty-bound to take on the responsibility for introducing Chinese cooking techniques and expanding Chinese dietary culture. Up till now, many experts have studied the translation concerning dietary culture and they have achieved a lot. Yet most of the studies only relating to dishes names, they discuss the translating technique and standard for translation of Chinese cultural elements contained in dishes names. They seldom touch the process of making dishes, i.e. selection of ingredients, preparing and cooking methods, etc. The author believes those mentioned above are of the same importance for developing and spreading Chinese diet. So she chooses this topic for research. This thesis attempts to offer a few commonplace remarks by way of introduction to translation of Chinese cooking culture so that others may come up with valuable opinions for this topic. By translation, Chinese cooking culture can be spread more widely and communicate with those of other nations more effectively, and it can also improve itself greatly. The thesis tries to explore the effective methods applied to the translation of cooking materials under the guide of Peter Newmark's semantic translation, communicative translation and a correlative approach to translation.This thesis, divided into six parts, deals with the following issues.Chapter One is introduction.Chapter Two introduces the close relationship between language, culture and translation, and then defines translation as the bridge of language and culture communication from the perspective of culture.Chapter Three introduces the distinct features of Chinese cooking culture, then tells the differences between Chinese and Western cooking.Chapter Four first introduces Peter Newmark's text typology and analyses the text type of cooking materials. Secondly it introduces his semantic and communicative translation. Thirdly, it presents his correlative approach to translation.Chapter Five combines theories with practices. It discusses the effective methods for translating Chinese cooking materials for the purpose of promoting the spreading Chinese dietary culture based on Peter Newmark's semantic translation, communicative translation and a correlative approach to translation. The author proposes that literal translation or literal translation plus explanation, free translation or free translation plus explanation, literal translation plus free translation, and transliteration or transliteration plus literal, free translation or explanation are the effective methods for translating Chinese cooking materials.Chapter Six is conclusion.