TranslEatability: food and eating in a large corpus of newspapers

ZANCA Cesare (Università degli Studi di Siena) TranslEatability: food and eating in a large corpus of newspapers Email address: cesare.zanca@unisi.it Food is a fundamental and irreplaceable aspect of our daily life. It is a basic need for survival, an issue for the future of mankind, a key element for our health and wellbeing, an occasion for social and individual fulfillment, an essential component of our culture and social identity. Not surprisingly, in our global communication society, it seems to gain attention and a growing relevance in the language we use and therefore in translation. Translating, though, is not easy and translations do not always succeed in identifying a suitable equivalent in the target language and in creating the same personal, social and cultural impact on the target reader. In this respect food is emblematic: what is translatable is not always “translEatable” and what we taste might not correspond at all with what we expected. It is not always a problem of the quality of the translations of menus (as in Bassnet 2011:152): very often the most suitable linguistic equivalent in the target language simply tastes like something else. A caffé in Italy is different from a coffee in English and from many of the ‘equivalent’ coffees one gets when using the translated equivalents of the word in other countries. If we order a granita in India we might get something very different from what we get in Sicily. Indeed, the issue of the ‘translEatability’ of food is not only interlinguistic, but also intralinguistic: the granita you eat in Catania is unique and different even from the one you can order in a bar in Palermo or Milan. According to Newmark, food in translation is linked to the expression of ‘national culture’: "Food is for many the most sensitive and important expression of national culture; food terms are subject to the widest variety of translation procedures" (Newmark, 1988:97). But food is also inevitably associated with individual experience: the real and best chocolate cake is the one our grandmother used to make. Cultural and national elements are important in dealing with the translation of terms about eating, dishes and culinary products, but very often food, and its ‘translEatability’ is revealing of other contextual aspects related more specifically to identity and personal experiences: something that has been referred to as ‘experiential equivalence’ (Sechrest et alt, 1972 47). The assumption of this paper is that words and expressions related to food can be very helpful in identifying, discussing and teaching both translation issues and cultural and evaluative aspects of language. Trough the analysis of some Italian loan words used in English, such as salami, cassata, granite and some more general words related to food and eating in a large international corpus of newspapers in English (the Sibol-Port Corpus- investigated according to the MD-CADS approach), and in some examples of texts used in my translation university classes, I shall try and point out how food related lexical items and 76 their use in different newspapers and in different countries and can be revealing of stereotypes, cultures, attitudes and ‘experiences’ of their readers. References Bassnet, S. Reflections on Translation. (2011) Bristol: Multilingual Matters Newmark, P. A Textbook of Translation. (1988) New York: Prentice Hall Partington, A. “Modern Diachronic Corpus-Assisted Discourse Studies (MD-CADS) on UK newspapers: an overview of the project.” Corpora 5 (2) (2010): 83-108 Sechrest, L., Fay, T.L. and Hafeez Zaidi S.M., “Problems of Translation in Cross-Cultural Research” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 3(1)(1972)