Cooking Chinese And Korean Verb Contrast Research

Diets and culinary arts are integral parts of human culture, upon which China and South Korea have their own national characteristics, understanding the dietary vocabulary is a key step to explore the culinary culture. Taking the culinary verbs in cuisine books as the object of study, under the theoretical guidance of semantics and contrastive linguistics, this paper analyzes the selected culinary verbs semantically, trying to find out the translating relationship between Chinese and Korean when certain action is referred.Observing and calculating statistically the culinary verbs in cuisine books, culinary arts books, classified dictionaries, and previously research papers, this paper takes those culinary verbs of high frequency as the common culinary words and sets them as the object of study. As analyzing the whole cooking semantically is concerned, the cooking is classified into A to F subsets (’oil’,’water’,’steam’,’radiant heat’,’smoke’,’liquid flavorings’) according to the different heat transferring medium needed, and subset G which is free of limitation of the heat transferring medium, upon which semantic analysis is carried out respectively. By employing entries in dictionary and examples in cuisine books, semantic composition analysis of each sememe in the subsets is carried out to get the semantic field distribution map of every subset, based on which the contrastive analysis of Chinese and Korean culinary verbs is under way. The result suggests:Sememe exists in all the subsets of Chinese and Korean culinary verbs. That is to say, there is no absence of semantic field. Subsets A to G all have corresponding sememe, and some are even one-to-one corresponding culinary words with exactly the same semantic components. Apart from the similarities, there are also significant differences in the semantic field of Chinese and Korean culinary verbs. Such as the number of sememes varies in subsets, and the levels of downward analysis of words differ. National characteristics of diets and culinary arts should account for the similarities and differences. Finally, observing the contrastive analysis result, this paper explores the translation in the aspects of exact equivalents, partial equivalents, non-equivalents, and puts forward some advices, for improvements of current dictionaries in particular.This paper is of certain importance to the diets and culinary arts cultural exchanging, and can shed some light on the bilingual translation and editing of dictionary of the specific field.