This one still escapes us. Have a few close words, but not one that fits specific species.
Talking abut bio products being cured, not an ailement needing to be cured.
The confusion in chinese i guess is most closely with “aged”.
Example that always seems to fail the translate back and use in a sentence with another product test.
Vanilla
Tamarind
Cured fruit, how would one say in chinese without confusing it with something like aged cheese?
What immediately occurs to me is 醃 or 醃制. What is “cured fruit”? It makes me think of 蜜餞.
I don’t think a single term in Chinese can capture the concept of cured. Like the 陳 in 陳皮 could have that meaning, or the 乾 in 芒果乾.
Ya, i think you are very right in saying not one word in mandarin translates cured. Truthfully, in english it can be a broad term as well. But in english it is easy to say it like: cured _________ be it meat, cheese, plant etc. The process becomes clear based on the noun used. But in chinese this doent work well. At least for some things.
Hence the examples of vanilla beans and tamarind fruit. Good examples we have not been able to figure out. Cheese and that has a clear word but so far cannot find one for these 2 specifically. There are many such fruits that are more obscure, but many peoppe know these 2. Although the chinese word for vanilla is itself not at all specific.
So lets use vanilla as the first example.
I dont think these work
蜜餞 implies adding sugar to the aging process. Candied.
(芒果, any fruit)乾 literally means dried. In practice it means partially dried. With or withou preservative (acids, sugars or salts). But basiclly mens a dry fruit. I think this is posaible to label for tamarind but not vanilla. But the main difference ia mango is not cured. At all. Ever. Its just dried a certain way. Whereas say tamarind and vanilla are both cured for months then adjusted for moisture content, “dried”.
陳 seems like a good candidate. I will ask the wife to type the chinese of our closest guess but it still seems off in the way it is processed.
Sorry my phone only has alphabet style, cant draw the characters and thats the inly way i can write. So will write the characters after christmas. But we keep running around in more or less these categories:
Aged
Fermented
Preserved
Salted
Candied
To help me understand or explain concepts that cannot be explained easily with the term in one language, I often go to Wikipedia.
First I look up the item I need an English. Next, I find the language selector bar and choose the target language, in this case Chinese.
This does not call up a translation of the article but instead, it calls up an article on a subject written by a native speaker of that language.
If your understanding of that language is acceptable, there you go.
If it is not, you can than Translate that article using Google translation and examine the the important key phrases with the Chinese/English dictionary.
I use this method when looking up unique things like Taiwanese small towns. The English article can be one paragraph or even a sentence but the Chinese article could go on for pages.
English Wikipedia: Curing (food preservation)
Chinese Wikipedia:
Nice methodical process, thanks for explaining.
In TCM you can have three sets of characteristics for the same plant (I mean the same part of the same plant), depending on whether it’s fresh, dried, or 熟, which can be translated as prepared but refers to a kind of curing process.