Practice Report Of Studying On Interpreting Of Chinese Food Culture From Skopos Theory

Intercultural exchanges have become increasingly important in current world and food culture rises as an indispensable part during cross-cultural communications.Nearly all intercultural dialogues involve dining experience or table etiquettes.Chinese food culture is not simply about extensive and profound food variations,but also a combination of philosophy,historical events,local customs and other cultural connotations.In this way,effective and appropriate interpreting of food culture proves to be most significant for foreign exchanges.The author was fortunate enough to participate in a two-week training program organized by the Ministry of Agriculture.During the task,the culture-loaded items related to culinary art posed great challenge to the interpreter who was supposed to apply multiple strategies to bridge the cultural non-equivalence.These culture-loaded items reflect history,psychology,health maintenance and other areas,requiring extensive knowledge deposits of the interpreter.Besides,the speaker’s impromptu explanations plus local accent of the speaker added to difficulties during interpreting.When researching on previous studies,the author notices that current food culture translation concentrates on written translation and the focus lies mainly in the dish names’ translation with few discussions on interpreting.On the other hand,skopos theory is the heated theoretical basis applied in cultural translation.The ideas of sticking to the purpose of the task,the goal of the speaker and the expectations of listeners enable the interpreter to seek alternatives to solve problems during interpreting.By comparing and analyzingdifferentversions of the food cultural phenomena,the author puts forward possible ways based on skopos theory when interpreting Chinese food cultural words: literal translation with explanation,transliteration with explanation,omission,isomorphism for particular items and information compression and integration.