A Study Of Foodstuff Instruction Translation From The Perspective Of Genre Analysis And Text Typology

Translation of foodstuff instruction has been an increasingly important medium for the outside world to know Chinese food culture. In spite of great improvements in recent years, the current foodstuff instruction translation is far from satisfaction. From the prospective of"functionally appropriate"translation, a well-translated foodstuff instruction is no longer a correct rendering of the source text, but rather a target text which effectively fulfils its communicative purposes and text functions in the target context. In this thesis qualitative and quantitative methods are used in the research and 50 English foodstuff instructions and 50 Chinese ones have been collected from internet and supermarkets as samples. By adopting V. K. Bhatia's genre analysis, it strives to exploit genre conventions of English and Chinese foodstuff instructions in terms of their communicative purposes, analyze their text types and functions on the basis of Newmark's text typology, and integrate the findings to propose translation strategies and approaches for solving practical problems.Based on Bhatia's genre analysis theory, foodstuff instruction is identified to be a highly conventionalized and structured communicative event with purposes of promoting sales and providing information. Through recognition of a series of communicative purposes, the thesis concludes a prototypical generic structure of foodstuff instructional text, which comprises six moves"Identifying the foodstuff—Introducing the foodstuff—Informing foodstuff content—Instructing foodstuff storage/consumption—Establishing credentials—Providing manufacturer information". And each move has its own steps. With a contrastive analysis of each move and step, it reveals that there exist great similarities and differences of genre conventions on the level of linguistic strategies and social culture between English and Chinese foodstuff instruction texts, like using different communicative role, lexical boost and diverse sentences, and valuing different foodstuff history, foodstuff service rationale and credentials establishment in terms of culture, etc. Meanwhile, on the basis of Newmark's text typology, foodstuff instruction text is recognized to have two main functions: informative function of providing information and vocative function of stimulating readers to purchase; besides, it also has a minor function: aesthetic function of creating a sense of beauty to please readers. With this analysis, it can be identified as a multiple text type of informative and vocative functions.From our samples such common translation errors as linguistic errors, functional errors and cultural errors can be found everywhere in the English translation of Chinese foodstuff instruction. Through exploration of their causes, more efforts have made on the establishment of principles for translating foodstuff instruction: to be accurate in meaning; to localize genre conventions for the sake of readability; and to represent the original functions of the source text. To produce a target text of professionalism and functional equivalence, the thesis puts forward some specific translation approaches in the light of main strategy of communicative translation, including omission, addition, borrowing and adaptation. These approaches should be carried out on the basis of the similarities and differences regarding organizational structure, linguistic strategies and social culture between English and Chinese foodstuff instruction in order to improve the quality of foodstuff instruction translation.