If a producer wishes to have his products certified as organic food, they must conform to the standards for the production of organic food and become accredited by an authoritative institution. For example, products in Australia must adhere to the Organic Standard of National Association for Sustainable Agriculture, Australia (abbreviated as NASAA) to be certified as organic food; in the United Kingdom, they must be accredited by the Organic Farmers and Growers Ltd. (OF&G) authorized by DEFRA, UK; and in the United States, they should conform to the National Organic Program set up by the US Department of Agriculture. Now these standards concerning organic food are recognized among most countries of Europe and the Americas. Organic food is closely related to organic farming, which was developed in industrialized countries as a response to the damage brought by the industrialized agriculture. In 1972, International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movements (IFOAM) was founded in Versailles, France with the aim to exchange practices and standards of organic farming among different countries.

       Therefore, the two terms have their respective origins and their referent is fixed in their own linguistic contexts. If their standards are the same, it can be argued that the two terms, lüse shipin and organic food, are equivalent terms and they can be mutually substituted in different languages. However, they are not the same. China has set up two general standards for lüse shipin, i.e. Standard A and Standard AA. According to the research of Xie Yongping from Nanjing Agricultural University, "Lüse shipin of Standard AA is organic food, but not vice versa. Only those organic foods whose productive environment, operations in the production, product quality and packaging all conform to the Standard AA of lüse shipin can be certified as lüse shipin of Standard AA. In other words, organic food is the quasi-lüse shipin of Standard AA" (1998: 7). Standard A of lüse shipin is less strict than that for organic food. Thus, the two concepts are related but different. Their relationship could be shown in Figure 2:

        

       Therefore, from a terminologist's perspective, Harman's view is incorrect. Organic food does not correspond to lüse shipin, and their referents are not the same, which violates the terminological principle that name and concept should be the same.

       As for the translation of the term green food provided by the New Age Chinese-English Dictionary, we have carried out a corpus-based research to see its usage in English as well as the reception of youji shipin (organic food) in the Chinese context, and then evaluate this translation.

       3. A corpus-based research of the reception of the terms

       a) A corpus research of terms in the SL

       By investigating the usage of some words in the modern Chinese corpora, translators would obtain some unexpected hints in the process of translation. As the case study is concerned, we examined the frequency of lüse shipin and its similar term youji shipin (organic food) in Modern Chinese. For this purpose, the online queries of the Modern Chinese Corpus managed by the Center for Studies of Chinese Language and Linguistics, Beijing University (abbreviated as CSCLL in this paper)3 and the Modern Chinese Corpus managed by the Institute of Applied Linguistics, Ministry of Education (abbreviated as IALME in this paper)4were made use of. The search results are as follows:

       Table 1 The Frequency of the terms Lüse Shipin and Youji Shipin

         lüse shipin (green food) youji shipin (organic food)

       CSCLL 4.18 per MC (481) 0.14 per MC (16)

       IALME 0.8 per MC (16)5

       0

       * Notes:

       1. MC means million characters.

       2. The number in the brackets is the total frequency in each corpus.

    &n

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