From the archives: ITI Scottish Network and ITI Food & Drink Network 'Food for Thought'
Tips from the ITI Scottish Network and Food & Drink Networks 'Food for Thought' event
Here’s an old post I wrote many years ago after attending an ITI event in Inverness, Scotland. I have really fond memories of this event, and it seemed a shame that my account of the experience was kept hidden away on my laptop!
Last Friday I set off for weekend far, far away from home up in Inverness with other foodie translators. This was my first event since becoming Food & Drink Network Coordinator, and I was really looking forward to meeting other members of the network, and to catching up with Scotnet members, who never fail to put on a good bash.
The event certainly lived up to expectations. On the programme were Karen Stokes (founder and first ever coordinator of the ITI Food & Drink Network), Lulu Norman and Norma Tait, all true experts in this field and each with fascinating real-life examples. Karen ran a practical session addressing and finding solutions to the challenges of working with menus and culture-specific dishes ('Cullen Skink', anyone?), while Lulu gave a fascinating insight into her co-translation of a Lebanese cookery book from French into English, and Norma, an expert in the field of whisky, rounded off the day with the brilliantly-named talk 'My experience – distilled'.
Here are my main takeaways from the day:
• Remember you are selling a product, and think about who you are selling it to – is it the chef or the diner? How tasty a dish sounds is very important, and advanced creative skills are often called for. Take 'gizzards', for example. Yum, huh? There is a constant balance to be found between the 'acceptability' factor and losing the poetry of the original writing.
• Consumers, particularly higher-end consumers, are usually pretty attuned to foreign words, which can be kept in the translation. Think 'coulis' and 'béarnaise'. Karen's advice was that if they sell it in Sainsbury's under a foreign name, that's a good yardstick. Indeed, sometimes using another European language, particularly French, can act as a 'bridge'.
• The words we use to describe food can changes between generations. Take 'muffins' for example, which I would now tend to use to describe a small, cupcake-like cake rather than a breakfast muffin or 'English muffin' (which I would probably called a 'breakfast muffin'). Think about who the end user of the document will be and be guided by that.
• Remember that in recipe measurements you may be catering for two 'Englishes'. Always check with the customer if they'd like conversions, and whether any measurements might even need to be adjusted to suit the type of products available in different countries. Lebanese flour is not necessarily the same as the flour we get in the UK, and other countries may have different techniques for ingredients as common place as garlic, for example. Did you know that in France they tend to remove the green core of a garlic clove before using it?
• Recipe styles can differ between countries. Recipes in the UK have a very discursive and descriptive style, preferring adjectives such as 'chopped' or 'diced', while many French recipes adopt a fairly technical style.
• Go for an hourly, rather than a per-word rate, if you can: food being such a clear indicator of cultural difference, translating in this field can be a real labour of love. But don't let that mean you are short changing yourself!
• As always, some terms just cannot be translated into one word in another culture and the simplest approach is to explain the concept, particularly in an interpreting situation. Norma gave the excellent example of 'mash tun'. The Portuguese term she once heard used to describe the 'mash' (‘mistura’) doesn't quite capture it, does it?
