Food, Culture and Translation. Observations on Translating Recipes from English into Italian.

Abstract

Food is an important part of human cultural expression, and recipes are a way of transmitting the knowledge on its preparation. This dissertation consists in the translation from English into Italian of a sample of recipes belonging to the British and Italian cultural areas and to a mixed “Anglo-Italian” area. The focus is on the rendition and acceptability, for an Italian public, of the cultural elements of the recipes originally thought for a British public . First, the work provides some considerations on the relationship between food and culture. Then, the characteristics of the genre “recipe” are exposed, and useful aspects of translation theory are presented. The recipes included in the dissertation are then translated and each one is presented with a commentary which focusses mainly on their cultural aspects. In conclusion, it is possible to observe that the main problems relate to units of measurement, ingredients’ availability and the need to substitute them or explain their characteristics, implicit traditions in the source culture that need to be explained in the target culture, how Italian recipes and references are treated by the British which need a “re-Italianization” process when presented to the Italian culture, and the need to render the critiques moved to Italian cuisine more acceptable for an Italian public especially in those contexts where they cannot be eliminated.