WE ARE WHAT WE EAT, OR DIFFICULTIES IN TRANSLATING CULTURE-BOUND FOOD NOMINATIONS FROM CHINESE INTO UKRAINIAN AND ENGLISH

Abstract

The article is dedicated to the specifics of rendering Chinese culture-bound food nominations into Ukrainian and English. The relevance of the research is determined by the fact that it is conducted at the crossroads of cognitive and cultural paradigms of Translation Studies. FOOD is treated as a cultural concept whose linguistic embodiment reveals particular traits of the national culture and mentality and also as a category whose referential field covers a number of food-related domains. This broad definition of food provides for the better understanding of associations that permeate all the domains of the category tying together units within and outside them. In search of the material, we turned to the Chinese–Ukrainian Illustrated Dictionary that includes 413 food nominations (also referred to as “gastronyms”) located in 15 domains according to the method of mind-mapping. Each of the entries is supplemented with an object’s picture that contributes to its better understanding in foreign cultures. It was established that the level of cultural specificity as revealed in translation equivalents is not equal in different domains. It is relatively low for fruits and vegetables whose names were borrowed from other languages or coined on the basis of the European or classical languages. Such practice was typical for the colonial period when cultural specificity of the colonized nations was deliberately eliminated. At the same time, national coloring is especially high for the names of the dishes coined under the influence of different types of associations, namely those of color, size, shape, consistence, resemblance, etc. The com-parative analysis demonstrated that the associations underlying the Chinese names are lost for both Ukrainian-speaking and English-speaking recipients despite the application of loan translation for their transfer.