On English Translation Of Chinese Menu From A Cultural Perspective

Cuisine has rarely been considered worthy of serious academic study, mainly because there is a widely-held view that only "serious" subject matters are worthy of academic research, as a result, the study of cuisine has not been taken seriously. We can easily find many collections of Chinese cookbooks on bookshelves, but seldom do we come across research books on Chinese food written in English. What we can get is only a few pages scattered in journals, most of which emphasize the categorization of different translations of Chinese culinary terms.This thesis, based on the cultural transaltion theory of Susan Bassnett, seeks to provide an English translation of Chinese cuisine from a cultural perspective. It focuses not only on the translation methods but also on the explanation of its cultural background. By comparing the different translations of Chinese dishes and analyzing them from a cultural perspective, it can be seen that culture plays an increasingly important role in translation and people pay much more attention to the cultural factors in dealing with translation problems. This has been elaborated upon in the Cultural Theory of Susan Bassnett.For this case study, the author has chiefly selected three transaltion phenomena, which are the literal, free, and zero translations, based on the understanding that translation is a continuous process that always has its preconditions of intercultural background, and that all different strategies and techniques are governed by the variations of social and cultural conditions. We can thus conclude that literal translation or even zero translation does better than free translation in embodying and exporting the source language's culture, though not so smooth as free translation. On the other hand, translation is not just for the purpose of communication but an important form of cultural exchange, so in order to promote exchanges among different cultures, literal translation, zero translation, and some other translation methods which can transmit the source culture better should be fully employed.Menues of 4-star and 5-star hotels, apart from some dish names from other sources, are chosen for the subject of this study, due to their fame and familarity. The menus aremainly classified into several categories based on translation strategies and techniques.