British Tourists’ Views on English Menus in Chinese Restaurants and their Implication for Menu Translation

摘要

This paper employs a questionnaire to investigate whether tourists to China find the menus in Chinese restaurants satisfactory and what might hinder their understanding of the menus. The findings based on the questionnaire responses suggest that tourists pay more attention to dish descriptions than dish names and lack of description tend to pose the greatest difficulty in their choice-making process. It is also found that diners will not be bothered by occasional appearance of foreign languages and expect to see some highly technical words on the menu. Therefore, menu translations should attach more importance to descriptions and could sometimes resort to Pinyin, a phonetic transcription system for Chinese characters, to solve the non-translatability of some terms.