Eating and drinking seen through translation: A study of food-related translation difficulties and techniques in a parallel corpus of literary texts

Abstract

This paper presents an exploratory study on translators’ decisions when encountering food-related translation difficulties in a parallel corpus of German original narrative texts and their translations into Spanish and Catalan. For this purpose, all food- and drink-related lexemes in the German original texts were extracted and classified in semantic groups. As a second step, the source and target text fragments of lexemes related to foodrelated cultural referents, metaphorical expressions or ways of eating and drinking were extracted and analysed in view of the techniques applied by the translators of both language combinations. The results obtained through the classification and quantification of the translation techniques in these three domains allow conclusions to be drawn regarding a) the existence of foreignizing or domesticating tendencies in the translation of food terms, b) the ways translators deal with action verbs that encompass multiple meaning aspects and c) the degree of metaphoricity and food-relatedness in the translation of metaphorical expressions.