Abstract: Translations of restaurant menus from Catalan or Spanish into
English are important for the Catalan restaurant industry and for tourism in
general, since an improvement in the quality of the translations may lead to
higher standards of service and better socio-cultural exchanges. A sample of
1013 menu items from the Tarragona area suggests there are differences in
functionality between the menus translated in the 1970s/1980s and those
translated in the 1990s. A possible reason for these differences is that all
the menus from the 1970s/80s were translated by professional translators, and
those from the 1990s, by non-professional translators. The study also suggests
that books on menu translations published by the Catalan government in 1991
did not reach the restaurant owners and that official translation policy in
this area has thus had little effect.
Introduction
It is generally agreed that translation is not only a linguistic activity
but a cultural one as well. The cultural element is extremely important in the
case of menu translations because it is often impossible to find an exact
equivalent for items that belong exclusively to the source culture. The
translator is frequently faced with problems such as culture-specific
concepts, semantically complex source-language words, and concepts not
lexicalized in the target language (cf. Baker 1992: 21-26). Translators are
required to decide what strategies and procedures should be used to solve
these problems.
If translations are to be functional, that is, if they are to fulfil a given
communicative purpose in the situation and culture in which they are received
(Nord 1991: 12), translators must ideally have not only a good command of the
languages involved but also good knowledge of the field the text belongs to
and some background knowledge about the source and target cultures. In the
case of menu translations in Catalonia, translators should ideally have a good
command of Catalan or Spanish and English, and some knowledge of Hispanic and
English cultures. It would also help to have some notions about food and
restaurants, but if translators do not know enough about the field they should
at least be able to locate the pertinent information.
Given these premises, we were interested in finding out how functional menu
translations are in the Tarragona area, whether they fulfil their
communicative purposes, how target-text readers react to them, who translates
them into English, and how common translation problems are solved. Menu
translations can also tell us something about the role English plays in this
particular field in Spain. Further, research on menu translations could lead
to suggestions as to how to improve the quality of these translations and
might thus help enhance the role that menu translations play in satisfying the
tourist’s demand for better service. Our study has also tried to find out to
what extent two multilingual glossaries of restaurant vocabulary, published by
the Generalitat de Catalunya (the Catalan government) in 1991, achieved one of
their main purposes, namely, to help restaurant owners translate the menus
themselves.
Initial attempts at answering the above questions led to the formulation of
the following somewhat surprising hypothesis: menus translated in the 1970s
and 1980s are more functional than those done in the 1990s. Our main goal here
will be to substantiate and explain this hypothesis, stressing the important
links between the variables ‘functionality of translations’,
‘professionalism of translators’ and ‘period in which the translations
were done’.
Method
This research began in late 1997 with the collection of fourteen restaurant
menus from the Tarragona area, giving a total of 1,113 coupled pairs, written
both in Catalan or Spanish and English. This was followed up by interviews of
the restaurant owners, who were asked the following questions:
- When was the translation done?
- Who did the translation?
- Did you pay any money for the translation?
- Have you heard about the glossaries for restaurant menus published by the
Generalitat in 1991?
Since it was very difficult for the restaurant owners to remember the exact
year in which the translation was done, they were asked to answer the first
question by choosing between ‘1970s’, ‘1980s’, and ‘1990s’. To the
question about who did the translation, they had to choose between
‘non-professional translators’ (explained as ‘unpaid translators for
whom this is not regular work’) and ‘professional translators’
(‘people who translate regularly and get paid for doing so’).1 Answers to
the third question, about payment for the translation, were closely linked to
the answer to the second: if the translations had been done by professionals,
money had been paid to them, and if they had been done by non-professionals,
nothing had been paid. Finally, when the owners were asked to say whether they
had heard about the glossaries published by the Generalitat, if their answer
was affirmative they were asked to indicate when they had heard about the
books and whether they actually seen them or not. Further minor questions were
also asked to make the interview more personal.
The functionality of the menus was then rated according to ‘correspondence
of content’ and ‘intelligibility’. The variable ‘correspondence of
content’ was checked by the researcher, taking as a contextual yardstick the
glossaries published by the Generalitat. The variable ‘intelligibility’
was assessed through the use of questionnaires.
The main problem here was choosing the informants. In theory, native speakers
of English are the ones who are going to read the menus. Nevertheless, English
has a huge number of speakers nowadays: some 320 million people have it as a
mother tongue, 350 million people use it as a second language and about 300
million use it as a foreign language (Crystal 1996: 108). For this reason,
non-native as well as native speakers of English were asked to read and
evaluate the menus. This actuially involved three pairs of readers. The first
two informants were English people who have been living in Spain for more than
fifteen years; the second two were English people visiting Spain for the first
time; the third two were non-native speakers (actually Germans) with some
knowledge of the English language and culture. All the subjects were
undertaking or had completed university studies.
The informants were told that the researcher was interested in the way English
speakers or speakers of English would react to the translations. They were
given a copy of the menus, only in English, and some instructions about how
they had to rate them.
The first thing that was evaluated was the clarity of the target-text
expression, focusing on purely formal linguistic qualities. The subjects were
asked to say to what extent the language used in the translations made their
reading difficult.2 For example, the target text “Sirloin of pig with [piquillos]
to the garlic” is unclear, grammatically incorrect, and thus difficult to
read, if even cultural competence might allow the tourist to take a bet on
what it means.
Understanding this, the informants had to say to what degree their reading
was disturbed:
- not at all (5)
- hardly (4)
- a little bit (3)
- quite a lot (2)
- a lot (1)
- almost impossible to understand (0)
The informants were then asked to say whether the non-formal content (which
we might call the ‘cultural’ element) made it difficult for them to make
sense of the texts. In effect, they had to decide to what extent the cultural
gap between the Spanish or Catalan and English cultures made the reading of
the translations difficult. An example here might be the menu item “escalivada”,
rendered as “escalivada”. If no further explanation is given, the reader
will not be able to divine the referent and would probably not risk ordering
to find out.
Understanding the nature of these cultural difficulties, the informants
were asked to choose between the same options as those given for the previous
question
It was immediately clear that the functionality of the menus from the
1970s/1980s was quite different from those of the 1990s. After checking
whether there were correlations between the ratings of the individual
informants, group t-tests were run to see whether the mean differences between
the translations of these two periods were significant.
Results
Interviews with restaurant owners
Half of the fourteen menus were translated in the 1970s/1980s and the other
half in the 1990s. It was found that all the translations from the 1970s/80s
had been done by ‘professional’ translators and all from those from the
1990s, by ‘non-professionals’. None of the restaurant owners had the
Generalitat’s books and only two of them had heard about them. Only those
who had had their menus translated by professional translators (half the
sample) had paid any money for the service.
It should be noted that, although this was not one of the formal questions,
both cheap and expensive restaurants were found to have functional and
non-functional translations. Nor did the area where the restaurants are
located seem significant: in the centre of Tarragona, city of 100,000
inhabitants that received 210,000 tourists in 1995 (Generalitat 1996: 46), we
came across very good but also very bad translations. In theory, if
restaurants are in tourist areas, they might be expected to have more
professional translations, but this does not seem to be the case.
Content correspondence
In general there is adequate correspondence of content in all the menus.
However, there are cases in which the translator might not have knows how to
render certain words or groups of words and left them in Catalan or Spanish.
This mainly happens with culture-specific terms, as can be seen in the
following examples:
Original Gambas al ajillo (Spanish)
Translation Shrimps to the ajillo
Original Escalivada amb anxoves (Catalan)
Translation Escalivada with anxovies
Original Gaspatxo (Catalan)
Translation Gaspatxo
All these menu items could be translated by combinations of two or more
procedures. In these cases, a translation using a loan word plus explanation
(cf. Baker 1992: 34) could provide a valid solution:
Original Gambas al ajillo (Spanish)
Translation Prawns sizzled with garlic and parsley
Original Escalivada amb anxoves (Catalan)
Translation ‘Escalivada’ (ember-roasted sweet pepper, onion, tomato and
aubergine salad) with anchovies.
Original Gaspatxo (Catalan)
Translation ‘Gaspatxo’ (cold vegetable soup)
There were cases where the translator did not render a certain word or
groups of words:
Original Espatlla de xai al forn (Catalan)
Translation Shoulder of lamb
Original Cargols a la cassola (Catalan)
Translation Snails
Original Llom de porc a la brasa (Catalan)
Translation Pork loin
These could be translated as follows:
Original Espatlla de xai al forn (Catalan)
Translation Baked shoulder of lamb
Original Cargols a la cassola (Catalan)
Translation Snails casserole
Original Llom de porc a la brasa (Catalan)
Translation Charcoal-broiled/cooked pork loin
All the above examples have been taken from the menus translated in the
1990s, and the alternative translations we have proposed have been found in
the Generalitat’s glossaries: Vocabulari de restaurants and Vocabulari de
bars i restaurants. However, there are other ways in which the above menu
items might be translated. This is how some of the same items are rendered in
menus from the 1970s/80s:
Original Gambas al ajillo
Translation Shrimps in garlic sauce
Original Escalivada amb anxoves
Translation ‘Escalivada’ (grilled vegetables) with anchovies
Original Gaspatxo
Translation ‘Gaspatxo’ (cold soup made with bread, garlic, onion, olive
oil, vinegar, water, and salt)
After analysing the translations carefully it was found that, and as some
of the above examples show, the ‘non-professional’ translators took the
word or phrase as their translation unit. Many menu items were translated word
for word--for example, “pollastre rostit” was rendered as “chicken
baked”, without any syntactic inversion--and other basic translation
problems were left unsolved. In the case of the translations done by
“professionals”, the translation unit tended to be the dish or menu item
as text, and more explicitation strategies were in evidence, as can be seen in
the above renditions of “escalivada”.
Functionality of Menus
It may be assumed that the main function of a menu is to present what can
be eaten in a restaurant and to allow the client to make a choice.
Non-translated menus might also be supposed to be written in a way that makes
the choice easy, although there are numerous cases in which the prestige value
of certain kinds of language--for instance, French names for dishes in an
English context--may override criteria of immediate clarity. In the case of
translated menus, the codification of prestige is less in evidence but may
find a certain parallel in ther conveyance of values such as exoticism: a menu
might tell not only us what an “escalivada” is but also give us the
Catalan name for the thing, so we can try to pronounce a word of Catalan and
are aware that we are visiting Catalonia (tourists also pay for such things).
Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that the first priority for translated
menus must be informative, to bridge the often considerable distances between
different languages and cultures. A linguistically opaque menu may be exotic,
but it can only convey this quality as a positive value if and when the reader
has understood the general nature of the dishes. For this reason, the concept
of functionality privileged in our study is on the informative level.
We did not expect to find great differences between the menus of the 1970s/80s
and those of the 1990s. However, the ratings given by the six informants were
conclusive in this respect: the mean difference between the two periods was
1.69 points, which a group t-test for all scores indicated to be a significant
result: t(82) = 9.039; p < 0.0001. The differences between the menus form
the two periods are at least strongly intersubjective, with very high degrees
of correlation between the informants (mean correlation of 0.979) and
acceptable correlation between the Language and Culture variables (correlation
of 0.706). This would suggest that the menus of the 1970s/80s do indeed fulfil
informative communication purposes better than those of the 1990s.
Discussion
It might be assumed that if translators have received some training, the
problems that arise in the translation process can be solved more easily and a
functionally adequate target text can be more consistently produced. Our
findings seem to corroborate this assumption because the translations done in
the 1970s/80s were all produced by professional translators and those done in
the 1990s, by non- professional ones.
The data obtained also suggest that restaurant owners no longer look for
professional translators. This hypothesis could be explained by the fact that
English is now a more international language than it was 20 years ago. The
number of university translation programmes in Spain, for instance, increased
very significantly from four in 1989 to 16 in 1995 (Caminade and Pym 1995).
Nearly everybody has access to education and universities are crowded with
thousand of students. This situation may lead restaurant owners to assume a
person with certain familiarity with the English language also has
translational competence. This assumption may not always be wrong: Toury
(1995) affirms that some bilinguals are able to translate without being
“professional translators”. Others nevertheless argue that some
translation skills are specific to professional translation and are not
developed naturally by most bilinguals (cf. Kiraly 1995). One suspects that
the kind of strategies in evidence here, notably the use of selective
explanations, concern this latter category, although this certainly also
concerns the relative authority and confidence that comes with professional
status. Whatever the case, one of the menus in our sample was indeed
translated by a native speaker of English, and it was not rated among the more
functional translations.
The situation in the 1970s and 1980s was quite different from the one we know
today. Not so many people knew English, which was by no means as dominant as
it is now. Further, higher education was more limited; not every family had
some relation who had studied English at university. Thus, if restaurant
owners wanted to have their menus translated they had to go and look for
professional translators.
That this is no longer the case would seem to be recognized by publications
such as the Generalitat’s glossaries. Now anyone is invited to translate a
menu simply by looking up the items in the book. To check whether the
glossaries can be used to produce functional menu translations, we used them
to re-translate the seven menus from the 1990s. The re-translations were rated
by two of the same informants, using the methods that had been used
previously. The scores improved by a mean of 1.64 points [(t(6) = 4.223; p =
0.0055], suggesting that the glossaries are indeed helpful tools for the
translation of menus from Catalan or Spanish into English.
Conclusions
This study shows that the poor quality of the translations done in the
1990s can be improved by the use of official publications. Nevertheless, given
the lack of success the 1991 campaign seems to have had, some reassessment is
needed before any future action is taken. Perhaps obviously, it would also be
useful if the government carried out follow-up studies of its campaigns to
check the economic and social consequences of their investment.
It would also seem advisable that moves be made towards a general
qualification system for translators in Spain, perhaps independently of the
university translation programmes. That would allow for more immediate and
dependable social recognition of translational competence.
Notes
* The author would like to thank Gideon Toury and Anthony Pym for their
comments on previous versions of this paper.
1 These definitions of “professional translator” and
“non-professional translator” are not designed to be definitive or
essentialist. Although professional translators are known to have worked for
free, and non-professionals have been paid for translational work, we found
these definitions are good enough for our pragmatic purposes; none of the
restaurant owners expressed any difficulty with the concepts.
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source
http://tinet.fut.es/~apym/menus.html
