Serving Chinese food culture to the world: bridging the cultural, emotional and historical gaps through translation

Abstract

As the Chinese saying goes, “民以食为天”, which communicates that food is essential for survival. However, beyond its basic function to sustain life, food carries so many different meanings in the various facets of our lives. It is inextricably linked to daily life, culture and history. The sharing of cultures encapsulated in food may be read as a negotiation not only of culture, but of the beliefs and ways of life that the stories of food would reveal. Conceivably, for China, food translation continues to be an area of concern due to its rise on the global stage. Also, with various Chinese diasporic communities living outside of China, food also acts as a cultural bridge to one’s roots, and translation has a big part to play in this connection for the younger and non-Chinese speaking descendants. The chosen source text (ST) comprises two chapters from a monograph centred on food culture in China. While the sources consulted on food translation have considered translation strategies from various viewpoints, none of them have explored pairing up a transliteration with semantic translation, conceivably because of the constraints to keep menu translations brief. This project targets to render a target text (TT) that achieves a balance in the strategies of food translation, which would help the reader to appreciate the distinctiveness of Chinese culture, but at the same time gain an understanding of the culture-laden terms in English. Based on the translation results, this paper contends that the adoption of translation theories is not a zero-sum game, as Foreignisation, Domestication, Skopos, Functional theory, Paratext and Thick Translation are intertwined, balanced and layered, based on factors such as needs of target readers. The subjectivity and discretion of the translator is a key factor in the usage of the abovementioned theories.