A Text-Typological Approach To The Translation Of Chinese Food Labels Into English

Food labels function as a source of information and guidelines for consumers.The effective translation of food labels plays a significant role in promoting the salesand transferring the Chinese food culture into the TL community. In view of the poorquality in the present English translations of Chinese food labels, this study isdesigned to identify the problems and provide viable solutions. Building on thetext-typological approach, the study is based on60samples of food labels for bothquantitative and qualitative analysis, including30in Chinese and30in English.Through the genre analysis of the data, the generic structure of food labels issummarized along with the communicative purposes of the components involved.With reference to the statistic results, the study moves on to analyze the linguisticfeatures of food labels. The text type of food labels is defined within the framework oftext typology, and the translation errors are classified. Finally, the study puts forwardsuggestions for solving the problems in translation. The study shows that the foodlabel is a type of informative text which assumes informative, vocative and aestheticfunctions. Its structure involves five moves: indentifying the product—introducingthe content of the product—presenting instructions—establishing credibility—providingmanufacturing information, with several steps included in each move. Based on theanalysis, errors in the English translations of Chinese food labels are classified intopragmatic errors, cultural errors and linguistic errors. In order to avoid the errors inactual translation processes, the principles of function-orientatedness andreceptor-orientedness are proposed, backed up by the strategies of adaptation, addition,omission and borrowing. The study is expected to conduce to a better level oftranslation quality and provide useful insights into the practice of pragmatictranslation.