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Using Corpus Insights in Specialized Translation: Slicing and Dicing the Language of Food

Cookery books are governed by their own laws not only in the choice of vocabulary and fixed expressions, but also grammar and style. Their translations should accordingly not only be linguistically impeccable and technically accurate, but also read as if written by a professional. This paper discusses how the employment of corpus tools can help choose the most appropriate collocation or turn of phrase and validate hypotheses concerning crucial but nonsalient grammatical choices (such as the presence or absence of articles, or preference for singular or plural), stylistic, spelling and punctuation conventions. Several categories of snares lurking for the translator will be outlined with the help of a self-compiled corpus (1m tokens, <12k types), key characteristics of English-language recipes discussed, and numerous concrete examples vindicating the brownie points gained through analyses of recipe websites and cookery software in ways different from those envisaged by their creators in teaching ESP and specialized translation presented from the author’s over decade-long experience.1 1 A shorter version of this paper was presented at engcorpora 2015: English Linguistics and Corpora: Research Issues and Language Teaching Innovations, Université Paris Est Créteil Val-de-Marne on April 9, 2015. Some of the examples and discussion had appeared in (Paradowski 2010). 1 Food and culture Food is perhaps the most distinctive expression of an ethnic group, a culture, or, in modern times, a nation. —A. Sonnenfeld, Food: A Culinary History from Antiquity to the Present (1999: xvi) Food constitutes an inextricable part of our lives; more than being a purely biological necessity, it has been claimed to play a central role in many cultures (Counihan & Van Esterik 1997). Roland Barthes went as far as to assert that “an entire ‘world’ (social environment) is present in and signified by food” (1961/1997:23), assigning to food a ‘commemorative’ function: when people prepare meals according to the customs prevalent in their society, they can experience the tradition and past of their country, which had been passed from generation to generation ensuring the continuity of culinary customs. Thus by connecting contemporary times with the practices of our ancestors, food can be viewed as a tool helping preserve the culture of a society (e.g. just like African Americans cultivate their roots and culture through their cooking traditions; Hughes 1980). Culture determines not only what, but also how people eat. In his influential work L’Origine des manières de table Claude Lévi-Strauss analysed “how the cooking of a society is a language in which it unconsciously translates its structure” (1968/1997:35) – in his view, similarly to language, cooking is a society’s means of self-expression, and “in any cuisine, nothing is simply cooked, but