With the deepening of international exchange between China and other countries,every aspect of Chinese culture is catching people’s great attention from home and abroad. As one of the most essential parts of Chinese culture, Chinese cuisine culture has played a crucial role in promoting mutual understanding between China and western countries. However, the long-standing problem that the English translation does not go well with Chinese dish names is quite urgent and outstanding. During the Beijing Olympic Games held in 2008, the Chinese government had specially issued a document “English Visions of Chinese Menuâ€, which aims at resolving those inappropriate translations of Chinese dish names. Meanwhile, in recent years, the academic study of the Chinese dish names translation is gradually warmed up and many specialized dictionaries of Chinese dish names have been published. But it should be noted that so far there have been very few researches on Chinese dish names translation for compiling a Chinese-English dictionary of Chinese dishes, and the published dictionaries of Chinese dish names are not satisfying.In order to improve the existing dictionaries of Chinese dish names, the thesis analyzes the Chinese dish names translation in some Specialized Dictionaries of Chinese dishes and existing menu translations in popular restaurants in the market,and develops systematic strategies for optimizing the methods for translating a range of different dish names. Specifically, an analysis of existing dish names translation is made first and then current problems of translating various dishes are compared and summarized. Based on the analysis, corresponding translating patterns of various Chinese dish names are classified according to the dish names.The results indicate that because of the varying regions, occasions and cultural background knowledge of dishes translation, different translators adopt their own translation principles, so the situation of a dish with multiple translations abounds here and there. Moreover, due to the fact that the target users, the expected time and place are not identical all the time, each translator adopts different translationstrategies to realize diverse functions of the dish names translation, therefore there is still much room for improvement with regards to the dish names translation and the principles for dealing with the existing Chinese dish names translations in an expected dictionary of Chinese-English dictionary of Chinese dishes.These findings may lead to the development of the optimal strategy for translating Chinese dish names of a specialized dictionary. Combining different translation theories and the inborn features of dishes themselves, different translation patterns of each type of Chinese dishes are proposed, so as to provide constructive suggestions to help the making a Chinese-English Dictionary of Chinese Dishes and to improve the dissemination of Chinese cuisine culture. |