A Translation Report Of You Suck At Cooking:The Absurdly Practical Guide To Sucking Slightly Less At Making Food(Excerpts)

The source text is excerpted from the chapter “Some Basics” and “Breakfast” in You Suck at Cooking: The Absurdly Practical Guide to Sucking Slightly Less at Making Food by an anonymous youtuber.In this book,kitchen utensils,common condiments,cooking skills,and recipes are introduced with humorous words and sentences,which is very suitable for those who want to learn cooking.In today’s increasingly fast-paced life,more and more people think that cooking is a waste of time,and with the continuous development of the take-out industry,there is a wide range of food choices available every day,and people become more reluctant to cook.The translator hopes more and more people can learn to cook by themself for health and the environment by translating this book.As an absurd cookbook,there are not only frequently used technical cooking terms but also many humorous languages.How to deal with them properly is the key and difficulty of the translation project.The source text was translated under the guidance of functional equivalence theory which emphasizes the reaction of the target language readers should be the same as the source language readers.In the process of translating,translation methods like literal translation,free translation,and imitation,translation techniques like conversion,combination,and addition are adopted to obtain the closest natural equivalence between the source text and target text.From this translation project,the translator has concluded some principles of translating cookbooks.At the lexical level,if literal meaning is unnatural in the target language context,the translator must express the deep implication instead of the literal meaning.At the syntactic level,the translator shouldn’t be limited by sentence structure,the translated text should aim for more idiomatic expressions so that target language readers can accept them more easily.At the textual level,the form of the target text should be the same as the source text as possible.At the stylistic level,the stylistic features of the target text must be equivalent to the original text.