A Translation of and a Commentary on 100 Cooking Recipes from English into Arabic: How Culture and Culinary Translation Intertwine

Abstract

Not until the beginning of the 20th century did the recipe begin to be the subject of serious research and academic interest. It is even more rarely tackled in the realm of translation studies. The purpose of this work was to examine the recipe as a separate genre. One-hundred recipes were collected from five different sources, translated from English into Arabic, then both texts were analyzed through parallel-text analysis. This paper aims to identify the difficulties that translators may encounter in translating recipes from English into Arabic at the lexical, syntactic, textual and cultural levels. These textual features are divided into macro-textual and micro-textual features. The findings showed that there were no differences between the English and the Arabic recipe on the macro-textual level; however, there were some differences on the micro-textual level, such as the use of indefinite articles for reference, ellipsis, and the use of pronouns.  The translation techniques that prevailed in the translation of culture-specific items (CSIs) were delineated. The analysis showed that the most commonly used method to handle CSIs was couplets (41%), while the least used method was free translation (10%). Furthermore, 223 CSIs were identified, classified and translated.