Cultural Mediation in the English Translation of Chinese Culture-Specific Items

This study examines the dynamics of cultural mediation in the English translation of Chinese food-related CSIs. The corpus for this study consists of Zhongguo Wenhua: Yinshi as the Chinese source text and Chinese Culture: Foods as the English target text. The research adopts a dual-level theoretical framework, where the macro-level functional perspective guides translation to convey meaning and communicative effect, and the micro-level procedural analysis is used to analyze specific human translation choices, with an additional consideration of cultural-orientation tedencies reflected in these choices. Methodologically, the research employs a qualitative comparative design, in which the human translations are compared with the corresponding outputs generated by LLMs under diverse prompts. The study shows that human translators flexibly mediate cultural contexts, while LLMs often show limitations with culturally rich Chinese food-related CSIs. The study concludes that prompt design improves LLM translation quality and highlights cultural mediation as a dynamic human-AI collaboration.