Translation Strategies Applied in Culinary Culture-Specific Items

The gap between different cultures requires translators to easily convey the source language message to the target language readers by choosing appropriate translation strategies. This research used a Chinese menu and its English translation as data and focused on the two phenomena of culinary culture-specific items found in the menu and their translation strategies. This paper aims to determine the strategies used to translate the culture-specific items in the Chinese menu and its English translation. Therefore, Newmark's (1988) 14 culture translation strategies were adopted as the framework. In the process of tracking down the culture-specific items, the definition of Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) proposed by Javier Franco Aixela (1996) was also applied to this paper. The researcher first found out the CSIs in the data and classify all CSIs found according to the culture categories proposed by Newmark (1988) and the composition items appearing within a dish name, such as ingredients, cooking methods, seasonings, proper nouns, colours, shape, taste, metaphor, and allusions, etc. Second, We analysed the translation strategies used by the translator and calculated their frequency. Finally, the results of the study are presented in two parts. Thirteen of seventeen translation strategies proposed by Newmark (1988) applied in the data source. Among the strategies used, the transference and descriptive equivalence strategies are used most frequently.