A Report On Translating Mastering The Art Of French Cooking

With the development of reform and opening-up,especially with the rapid growth of China’s foreign trade in recent years,there are more and more international communications and activities in politics,economy,culture,education,and in other fields between China and western countries.This change has exerted great influence on Chinese people’s life.At the same time,the development of economic globalization has improved Chinese people’s living standard and broadened Chinese people’s horizons,making them pursue higher life goal,which includes gourmet food cooking.As one of the world’s three major food kingdoms(China,Turkey,France),Chinese people are enthusiastic about food cooking and are eager to know about western food cooking.In order to satisfy the need of learning to cook western food,the cooking material translation is becoming more important than ever before.However,nowadays most of the studies of cooking material translation are just focused on the Chinese menu translation from the perspective of culture difference and finding out the best translation method.By contrast,this thesis studies not only the menu translation from English to Chinese,but also the whole cook book translation,including the book title,the book recommendation in book covers and inside covers,dedication,acknowledgements,forward,table of contents,illustrations,basic cooking knowledge and recipe,copyright,index,and so on from English to Chinese,for the source text is richer in content and more flexible in language expression forms.So,the translator should try his/her best to keep the original style and meaning of the source text and in the meantime,use the idiomatic expression in the target language to make the readers understand it easily.This research discusses and analyzes the feasibility of Peter Newmark’s theory of semantic translation and communicative translation as a guide to Mastering the Art of French Cooking translation.The translation material of this paper is "Mastering the Art of French Cooking",which is a comprehensive cooking text book,aiming to introduce and explain,to guide the readers how to cook authentic French food.Peter Newmark’s theory can be adopted in cookbook translation,which includes communicative translation and semantic translation.In dealing with the translation of this book,the communicative translation strategy can be used in this case.Nevertheless,there are often sections in one text that must be translated communicatively and other sections semantically.So,we need to use both communicative translation and semantic translation alternately and effectively.The research shows that under the guidance of communicative and semantic translation theory,different kinds of cooking texts should be translated differently.Some of them had better be translated communicatively,some of them semantically,and others in both ways.There is a close inter-relativity between text type and translation strategy,which is reflected on lexical and syntactic levels.In this cook book,there exists three kinds of text types,namely informative text,expressive text and vocative text.(1)The informative text in this cookbook includes the table of contents,illustrations,forward,basic cooking knowledge,index,etc.The purpose of this text type is to precisely provide cooking knowledge and make the readers obtain the basic cooking information correctly as a textbook.In this case,we should mainly apply communicative translation strategy into translation.(2)The expressive text in this cookbook comprises dedication,copyright and loan words with special culture background and features.The purpose of this text type is to describe the thinking process of the author or represent the style and cultural elements in source language text.In translating these texts,we should mainly adopt Semantic translation strategy.(3)The vocative text in this cookbook includes the book title,book recommendation in book cover and cover inside,etc.The aim of this text type is to persuade the readers or guide the readers to take certain action as the authors wish.We should mainly employ communicative translation strategy in the process of translating them.And there is no such text which can be translated only by semantic or by communicative translation and we should view them as a whole,because the two translation strategies are complementary to each other.It means when translating a text,the translator should employ the two translation strategies alternately,sometimes with more emphasis on communicative translation,or more emphasis on semantic translation.In conclusion,we adopt communicative translation at most of the time when translating cookbook and apply semantic translation when necessary.