Abstract: Chinese dishes enjoy a great popularity all over the world. Their translation is a purposeful action possessing the skopos of achieving the cultural exchanges, realizing the necessary linguistic conversions and facilitating the aesthetic communication between the English and Chinese cultures. Therefore when dealing with the dish names containing cultural connotations, translators should be fully aware of the cultural gaps and employ proper translation strategies to build the bridge over the gap so as to produce a translated version that is understandable and acceptable to the foreign customers. The translators should also be fully aware of the linguistic differences and adopt suitable translation methods to realize the linguistic conversions. Besides the Chinese and western people have different aesthetic preferences. Chinese customers enjoy the dish names associated with beautiful images or auspicious and warm pictures, whereas western people focus more on the simplicity and usefulness of dish names. Therefore translators have to achieve the aesthetic conversions as well. |
