Thai to Chinese translation framework for Thai dishes

Abstract

Restaurants use menus to introduce their dishes to customers, from which customers can choose their favorite dishes and drinks. In this context, the menu serves as a medium of communication. While designing a suitable menu that can accurately meet the dietary needs of target visitors can be challenging, it can also represent a competitive advantage in the highly competitive restaurant industry. This "impression" of the menu is very important because customers can easily choose what to eat or not to eat by browsing the prices and pictures of the menu items on the premise that they can understand the translation. In other words, the menu is the restaurant’s primary advertising material. As the number of Chinese tourists visiting Thailand increases year by year, more and more Thai restaurants are translating their menus in Chinese to attract them. However, as most owners of local Thai restaurants do not have a high level of Chinese and use unprofessional translation tools and methods, many menus are not accurately translated, which confuses Chinese tourists and leads to negative reviews. The purposes of this research are to identify the causes of specific problems associated with translating Thai restaurant menus into Chinese and to establish a framework for Thai food translation for the catering industry and linguistics researchers. Textual analysis was used to collect Chinese tourists' comments and share the translation of Thai menus online, and some Thai restaurants were selected to conduct interviews in relation to the Chinese translation channels of menus. An academic discussion group composed of Chinese language experts from Thailand and China was established to analyze and formulate more accurate rules for the translation of dish names based on the different word order rules and different terms between Chinese and Thai. According to the translation framework, the accuracy and practicability of the new version of the menu can be verified by feedback obtained from the sample tourist satisfaction questionnaire. By interviewing some Thai restaurant owners and comparing various translation results, the researcher analyzed the practicability and defects of the main methods of translating Chinese menus in Thai restaurants. It is found that the main translation methods are manual translation and mechanical translation. Based on this finding, the focus group needed to create a more grammatically accurate translation framework and use it to make a Chinese menu set of popular Thai dishes. The design of the translation framework needs to refer to the different word order rules of Chinese and Thai, supplemented by relevant terminology theories, to create simple and practical proper terms for some Thai dishes. It is found that although there are many channels for Chinese and Thai translation, the above problems are all caused by the non-standard translation framework, which can be reflected in the process of software translation programs and human translation. Based on the recognition of the results and findings, the translation framework designed in this study can effectively improve the accuracy of Chinese menu translation and avoid the non-standard menu translation problem to a certain extent.