Abstract: Different from morphological level, there is strong untranslatability of Chinese dishes on phonetic level. The reason is that people try possible ways to avoid transliteration when accepting a foreign language concept and always use their source language concept to express or explain the target language concept. This is a commonly accepted psychology which leads to strong untranslatability on morphological level. However, when people can’t find a language concept in their source language to convey its corresponding concept of the target language, even difficult to give a very good explanation, transliteration tends to be the best choice. Untranslatability of Chinese dishes on phonetic level can be changed at different historical periods and there are many successful examples in translation of Chinese dishes.