The translation of Chinese dish names, as a good way to advocate Chinese dietary culture, plays a critical and essential role in Chinese culture。 But it still remains an arduous job to translate the Chinese dishes and it still requires lots of efforts。 The development of culture is dynamic, and it keeps continuous alternation。 It is a process that is in constant reproduction。 The present dish translation can’t meet the urgent need of the communication of dietary culture due to the low accuracy and the lack of translating standard。 Therefore, it is necessary in this situation to take notice of the standardization of dish translation。
2。 Literature Review
Belonging to culture and customs factors, cuisine is one of the important parts that influence the effects of intercultural communication。 However, with the exchange of food and dietary culture between China and the West, the situation has improved a lot in recent years。 As a result, more and the more schools have begun to research the field of Chinese dish names。
In the 1990s, some papers began to study on the subject of the translation of Chinese dish names。 Edward (1996) has once said menu translation was the process of inter-lingual transformation for semantic equivalence in the specific area of menu and terms in cuisine culture。 Chinese scholar, Mr。 Chen Jiaji (1993) pided the translation of Chinese dish names into several categories。 Later, some papers about the translation of Chinese dish names occasionally appeared in some journals。 Huang Haixiang (1999) regarded Chinese food as an indispensable part of traditional Chinese culture and put his efforts to explain to show the necessity of English translation。 Ren Jingsheng (2004) has summed up several practical translation strategies of Chinese dish names in the paper A Further Discussion on English Translation of Chinese Dishes and Foods。 Later, Qiao Ping (2004) thought that Chinese dish names could be pided into five groups according to the characteristics of their formation, and introduced some translation methods, such as direct translation, transliteration, transliteration plus meaning explanation, free translation, etc。
Other Chinese scholars, like Lv Erxin (2013), Xiong Xin (2016) and so on, whose data analysis and quantitative study also have confirmed that study the cultural difference is of great meaning for language learners, while offering some introduction to the Chinese and Western cuisine culture, in addition, they analyze the translation of Chinese dish names in many ways。文献综述
Chinese cuisine is an essential component of traditional Chinese culture, so there should be more scholars in the field to study the English translation of Chinese dish names。 In reality, there are few professional translation versions of Chinese dishes。 There still exist many serious problems in the light of the previous studies currently。 Many studies appear to be too general。 They focus on the strategies of translation but not on cultural information。 What is more, many scholars separate translation from cultural information。 How to fuse translation with culture together skillfully still remains a tough task in the English translation of Chinese dish names。
Therefore, the improvement of the quality of Chinese dish names translation demands immediate attention。