Translating Food Menus from English into Arabic: Linguistic and Cultural Dilemmas

Abstract

Translating food menus is a fundamental communication tool for restaurants and coffee shops to market their products and to inform their costumers about the type, quality and diversity of food and products available for their use. This study aims at investigating some translation strategies used to translate food menus from English into Arabic and the salient linguistic and cultural problems resulted fromthe usage of such inappropriate strategies. This study the focuses the translation strategies used to translate food menus in 10 restaurants and coffee shops in Muscat, Oman and the problems which resulted from the usage of such strategies and what could be suggested to help translation practitioners to handle such challenges. The selection of the corpus was based on practical reasons. The data was analysed descriptively by using frequencies and percentages. The findings revealed that there was a number of translation strategies used frequently to translate food menus in the corpus in questions which are: borrowing, literal translation, using a super ordinate word, amplification, reduction and using a load word plus an explanation respectively. The usage of these strategies caused several problems such as lexical ambiguity, lack of clarity and confusion. The study recommends that choosing the appropriate strategy for translating food menu is of a vital importance to help avoiding translation problems. What is the aim of the study?

The Translation of Culture-Specific Items (CSIs) in Chinese-English Food Menu Corpus: A Study of Strategies and Factors

“…Thus, the most frequently used method of translating Indonesian traditional food names into English is more leaned toward domestication strategy where the appearance of the food is described to assist target readers in recognizing it. Likewise, Al-Rushaidi and Ali (2017) examined food menus translation strategies from English to Arabic in 10 restaurants and coffee shops in Muscat, Sultanate of Oman, and the problems that arose as a result of their use. The study results indicated that frequently employed translation strategies in rendering food menus in the corpus include “borrowing, literal translation, using a superordinate word, amplification, reduction, and using a loan word plus an explanation” in that order, respectively.” The authors also note that the utilization of these procedures resulted in problems including lack of clarity and linguistic ambiguity, leading to misunderstanding of TT.…”

“…(a) Retention : That is, retaining the phonetic/graphic form of the source language (SL) CSIs, or adapting it to the phonetic structure, spelling, and morphology of the TL. Other scholars refer to this strategy as transliteration (Jiang, 2014; Stoyanova, 2013), transference (Newmark, 1988), and borrowing (Al-Rushaidi & Ali, 2017; Marco, 2019).…”

Representing Chinese Malaysians Culture in the Street Food Through the Chinese-English Translation Techniques

“…Reynolds (2016) found that literal translation, transliteration and the addition of an annotation appeared in food translation, but the focus was confined in Taiwanese foods. Al-Rushaidi & Ali (2017) proposed a framework for translating food names. These translation techniques are borrowing, literal translation, using a superordinate word, amplification, reduction, translation by cultural substitution and using a load word plus an explanation.…”

Strategic Approaches to Menu Translation Analysis

“…There are several researchers who ephasize two main functions of menus: to inform and to attract (Al-Rushaidi and Ali, 2017). Customers become informed about a restaurant offer through a menu, while at the same time they are tempted to make a choice.…”