福建省光泽第一中学高中英语教师论文 从跨文化(3)

Introduction

Nowadays, China plays an increasingly important role on the global stage. More and more people from other countries want to have a better understanding of China, especially this Oriental Lion’s culture. Since China’s reform and opening up to the outside world, foreigners are given more opportunities to personally step on this splendid land to enjoy its scenery and kinds of national culture. Chinese cuisine has long enjoyed a reputation of delicate, extravagant food throughout the world. Moreover; Chinese catering culture takes up a significant position in the Chinese cultural system. To introduce our catering culture to the coming visitors and to the outside world is an important task. Chinese dish names, as a window of China’s catering culture, are actually an effective means to inform foreigners of China’s special cultural environment. Therefore, Chinese dish names are highly worthy of being translated. Needless to say, successful translation of them serves as a bridge for the communication between China and other countries. To our delight, many versions of these dish names have been provided in various settings, including menus, cookbooks, food guides, tourist brochures, cuisine dictionaries, journalism or even literary works, all targeted at foreign readers. However, the quality of current translations is uneven, and many low-quality versions will probably give rise to misunderstandings and loss of cultural elements. Such consequence should undoubtedly be minimized or avoided with great efforts of translators.

There have been only a few articles and dictionaries that specifically deal with the translation of Chinese dish names so far. This paper presents a tentative study on Chinese dish names, and their English translation. By studying and evaluating a number of typical examples of Chinese dish names, this thesis aims to categorize them, sum up their features and functions, analyze the guiding principles, and propose the techniques for their translation.

1. The Difference of Catering Culture Between China and West

Culinary habits, also a kind of carrier of culture, cannot separate itself from culture. Chinese and Western foods share some similarities in ingredients, cooking methods and so on while possessing their own distinctions of diet conception and diet composition.

1.1 Catering culture

Catering culture, a sub-category of culture, which shares the common features of culture but simultaneously has its own characteristics. Catering culture refers to all the production fields that expand food sources and produce food, all kinds of social lives related to catering practice, and the ideology embedded within (Lin, 1997:2).Catering culture, as a type of culture, is also a constantly changing adaptive mechanism that is learned by people, with the ethnocentric feature. But catering culture also has its unique features as follows:

1) It is an ever-lasting culture. Catering culture will never separate itself form men’s lives as long as human beings still exist on this planet.

2) It is the oldest as well as the youngest culture. Catering culture starts from the moment when men produced the first tool to get food, thus it is of the longest history. Whether in Stone Age or Bronze Age, in Iron Age or modern times, the