A Report On The C-E Translation Of Once Upon A Bite(Feng Wei Ren Jian)(Chapter 1-2) From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

As an ancient Chinese saying goes,food is the paramount necessity of the people.Diet has been an essential theme in people’s daily life since ancient times.Due to the popularity of domestic food documentaries in recent years,the profound food culture around the world has grabbed peoples’ eyes.With the development of economic globalization and cultural pluralism,the translation of food culture books plays an important role in the spread of food culture and cross-cultural communication.The source text of this translation practice report is from the first and second chapters of Once Upon a Bite(Feng Wei Ren Jian),which respectively describe the development and application of sugar and crab in various parts of the world.This book is a food culture book involving humanities,history,aesthetics and art.Its language style is graceful and meaningful with strong literariness and readability.There are a large number of culture-loaded words,rich rhetorical devices and sentence patterns in the book,which are the difficulties and emphases in translation.This report on translation practice makes a detailed analysis and discussion of the translation process under the guidance of adaptation theory.According to the adaptation theory proposed by Jef Verschueren,this paper will analyze the translation of words,sentences and texts from four aspects: the structural object of adaptation,contextual relevance of adaptation,dynamics of adaptation and salience of the adaptation process.The structural object of adaptation is divided into two parts: adaptation at the lexical level and adaptation at the syntactic level.Transliteration and annotation are adopted to achieve lexical adaptation,while syntactic adaptation is achieved by adjusting word order and sentence structure.Contextual relevance adaptation contains an adaptation of communicative context and an adaptation of linguistic context.In the process of translation,the translator should consider the psychological world of the source author,characters in the book and the readers,the social and cultural backgrounds of the source language and the target language as well as bilingual differences in time and space.Moreover,the translator should pay attention to bilingual linguistic differences to translate works that conform to the context and culture of the target readers.To achieve dynamics of adaptation,other factors in the process of translation,such as the purpose of translation,the intention of the source author,the features and functions of the text and professional information should be considered comprehensively.The translator’s subjectivity also plays an important role in the process of translation,and the translator will consciously distinguish between implicit information and explicit information,and adopts translation methods such as annotation,explanation and ellipsis to adjust information of the source text.Accurate translation of culture-loaded words and cultural works with regional characteristics is very important for cultural exchange and development,and choosing food culture books as the breakthrough point can arouse readers’ wide resonance.The purpose of this report is to help the target readers understand the food culture and customs around the world and summarize the shortcomings and experiences of this translation practice to provide a valuable reference for similar translations in the future.