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ABSTRACT
Translated restaurant menus facilitate tourism and consumerism, but menu translation remains a peripheral area of professional translation and translation studies. This has economic consequences, because translations that exclude a dish's ingredients, cooking methods, or cultural associations may deter consumers. This article analyses translated menus featuring Chinese dishes in order to establish the extent to which intersemiotic, image-based approaches are used to complement written translations; the level of consistency with which ingredients and cooking methods are translated; and the frequency of culturally specific dish names that are challenging to translate. A corpus-based methodology is used to compare 3,000 Chinese dish names and their translations from China, Taiwan and abroad. The data reveals very limited intersemiotic translation in existing menus, inconsistent translations of ingredients and cooking methods, and a high percentage of dishes with culturally specific names. However, these are often omitted in translation, or lack supplementary information concerning their ingredients. It is proposed that a multimodal translation approach incorporating Jakobson's tripartite theory can enhance menu translation. Menus featuring Pinyin as an intralingual translation can engage learners of Chinese who use this method; interlingual explicitation clarifies a dish's ingredients, cooking methods and cultural specificity; and intersemiotic, image-based translation conveys culinary artistry clearly.
Acknowledgments
My thanks go to Bingbing Leng for authorizing the use of the photo in Figure 2, and to Duoduo Li for granting me full copyright to use the photos featured in Figures 3 and 4.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Dr Saihong Li is a senior lecturer in translation studies at the University of Stirling, UK, where she supervises PhD students in the area of translation and interpreting studies. Dr Li is the director of the Centre of Interpreting, Translation, Interpreting, and Intercultural Studies at Stirling, and is a fellow of the Chartered Institute of Linguists. She has also been a visiting professor in translation studies at the University of Strathclyde since 2017. Dr Li's diverse research interests fall broadly within the fields of interpreting and translation studies, corpus linguistics, lexicography, and second language acquisition. Her publications include the monograph To Define and Inform: An Analysis of Information Provided in Dictionaries Used by Learners of English in China and Denmark (2011).
Notes
3 Yin and Yang, a Chinese philosophy, suggests that opposite or contradictory forces (e.g. dark and light) are complementary, and interdependent in the natural world.