Avoid Translation Mistakes That Can Sour a Recipe (Transcreation). Food is one of the most important parts of almost every culture. It’s how people communicate, feed their children, celebrate major events, and show others that they care.
Transcreation: Cooking Up the Perfect Recipe
Recipes are an important part of every tradition, often handed down from one generation to the next. If you’re hoping to translate recipes into another language, you’re going to have to keep certain things in mind in order to avoid making crucial mistakes.
Sauté or Pan Fry?
Translation is all about creating the same meaning in the target language that exists in the source language.
Consider certain cooking terms and make sure you’re sending the right message. For instance, sauté, which comes from ‘sauter’, in French, literally involves tossing the food inside of the pan. Pan frying, on the other hand, means you’re letting the food brown on a low simmer.
If you use a generic term, like “fry”, or you describe the wrong process, your recipe followers will wind up with a very different, and sometimes inedible, meal.
Cultural Idioms
Idioms work their way into every facet of culture and life. For instance, if you literally translate “toss the salad”, you can imagine it might be very confusing to someone in another country.
This is especially true if you literally translate the word because the English word for “toss” translates as “throw” in other languages. Here again, paying attention to idioms helps you translate the meaning of the phrase instead of simply providing a literal translation.
How a Translation Agency Can Help
If you’re translating a recipe from one language to another, a language service provider can help you obtain the truest and most meaningful translation possible. Transcreation services go beyond literal translation and ensure your recipe is a well-crafted, informative, and accurate version of the original so your recipe followers will end up with an amazing meal – and the same one – no matter where they are.
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