An approach to analysing the quality of menu translations in southern Spain restaurants

Cuisine and restaurants are powerful tools for cultural, social and tourist image-building, and projection for tourist promotion, particularly in the case of major tourist places and destinations which boast a well-deserved, long-standing history and reputation for gastronomical beacons. When menus...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of multilingual and multicultural development 2017-02, Vol.38 (2), p.177-188
Main Author: Fuentes-Luque, Adrián
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Accuracy
Classification
Content Analysis
Destinations
Dining Facilities
English
error analysis
Error Analysis (Language)
Error Patterns
Foreign Countries
Foreign languages
Language Usage
Menu translation
Psychological aspects
Questionnaires
reception
Reputation
Reputations
Restaurants
Spanish
Spanish language
Tourism
tourist translation
Translation
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Summary:Cuisine and restaurants are powerful tools for cultural, social and tourist image-building, and projection for tourist promotion, particularly in the case of major tourist places and destinations which boast a well-deserved, long-standing history and reputation for gastronomical beacons. When menus are not properly translated (or transcreated) into a foreign language, restaurants and destinations risk losing not only a huge market, but also damaging their image and reputation. Quality tourism requires excellent products and services, and quality professional menu translation is paramount. Linguistic and psychological aspects affect the way menus are designed, composed, written, and translated, with the aim of enticing diners. This paper aims to analyse the quality of translated restaurant menus in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia, in order to shed some light on the main types of errors found in this key type of text. An empirical study of over one hundred restaurant menus is presented through an error categorisation framework, together with surprising insights from a brief questionnaire for professional menu translators. Finally, a number of proposals and recommendations are offered for better menu translations and a much desired improvement of quality tourist texts.
ISSN:0143-4632
1747-7557
DOI:10.1080/01434632.2016.1187154