Research On The C-E Translation Of Artistic Dish Names From The Perspective Of Relevance Theory

As the essence of dish names, artistic dish names are the most difficult andarguable to translate due to their rich cultural connotations, profound historicalallusions, and varied rhetorical devices. Thus, for their translation not only thelinguistic elements but also the extra-linguistic factors should be taken intoconsideration.This paper aims to discuss the methods for the C-E translation of Chinese artisticdish names from the perspective of relevance theory. Through a review of studies onChinese dish names, the characteristics and classifications of Chinese dish names aswell as their translation achievements have been clearly demonstrated in this paper,which contributes greatly to the study of this paper. Meanwhile, since relevancetheory is in nature a pragmatic theory, hence an analysis of the failures in thetranslation of artistic dish names from a pragmatic perspective is necessary for thesuccess of this thesis. With relevance theory as the theoretical foundation, thetranslation of artistic dish names is regarded as a dual ostensive—inferentialcommunicative process involving three participants: the original author, the translatorand the target readers. As this communicative activity is conducted between twodifferent languages and cultures, the translator should take the cognitive environmentof the target readers into full consideration and achieve mutual manifestation, try tomake the original author’s intentions and the target reader’s expectations meet, andfinally arrive at optimal relevance.With these as the core principles and artistic dish names from four-star and fivestar hotel as well as dish names on books as the examples, the paper holds aqualitative and empirical analysis about their C-E translation and discusses the twotranslation methods advocated by relevance theory in the translation of artistic dishnames—direct translation and indirect translation.