On the translation of culinary terms in Malaga province restaurant menus into English. A corpus-based study

HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X On the translation of culinary terms in Malaga province restaurant menus into English. A corpus-based study Acerca de la traducción de términos culinarios al inglés en cartas de restaurantes de la provincia de Málaga. Un estudio basado en un corpus FRANCISCO JAVIER DÍAZ-PÉREZ Universidad de Jaén. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. Departamento de Filología Inglesa. Edificio D-2. Paraje de Las Lagunillas, s/n. 23071 Jaén, España. Dirección de correo electrónico: fj[email protected] ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6772-0852 Recibido/Received: 2/10/2022. Aceptado/Accepted: 26/5/2023. Cómo citar / How to cite: Díaz-Pérez, Francisco Javier, «On the translation of culinary terms in Malaga Province restaurant menus into English», Hermēneus. Revista de Traducción e Interpretación, 26 (2024): pp. 135-159. DOI: https://doi.org/10.24197/her.26.2024.135-159 Abstract: The main objective of the present paper involves analysing the translation solutions adopted to render the names of dishes and drinks in a Spanish-English bilingual corpus of eighty restaurant menus from four localities of Malaga province. All in all, 1436 culinary terms and their English translations have been analysed. The results reflect a tendency to resort to translation solutions oriented towards the source culture, which apart from linking the target texts to the culture with which the dishes are associated, may make them more appealing to the target audience. Together with this tendency, translators tried to make sure that the English menus were understandable and informative. The culture-specificity variable has also been found to have an effect on the choice of translation solutions. Keywords: Menu translation; Malaga; culture-specific items; Spanish; English. Resumen: El principal objetivo de este estudio consiste en analizar las soluciones de traducción adoptadas para trasladar los nombres de platos y bebidas en un corpus bilingüe español-inglés de ochenta cartas de restaurantes de cuatro localidades de la provincia de Málaga. En total se han analizado 1436 términos culinarios y sus traducciones al inglés. Los resultados reflejan una tendencia a recurrir a soluciones de traducción orientadas hacia la cultura de partida, que además de vincular los textos meta con la cultura a la que están asociados los platos, puede hacerlos más atractivos para el público meta. Junto a esta tendencia, los traductores intentaron asegurarse de que las cartas en inglés fueran comprensibles e informativas. Se ha podido probar asimismo que la variable de especificidad cultural ha afectado a la elección de las soluciones de traducción. Palabras clave: traducción de cartas de restaurante; Málaga; elementos culturales específicos; español; inglés. Summary: Introduction; 1. On the translation of terms of food and drink, 1.1. Translation of terms of food in literary and audiovisual texts, 1.2. Menu translation; 2. Methodology, 2.1. Objectives, 2.2. Research hypotheses, 2.3. Description of the corpus, 2.4. Data encoding, 2.5. Statistical 136 Francisco Javier Díaz-Pérez HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X analysis; 3. Results and discussion, 3.1. General overview, 3.2. Cultural specificity variable; Conclusions; Bibliographical references. Sumario: Introducción; 1. Sobre la traducción de los términos de comida y bebida, 1.1. Traducción de términos de comida en textos literarios y audiovisuales, 1.2. Traducción de cartas de restaurantes; 2. Metodología, 2.1. Objetivos, 2.2. Hipótesis de investigación, 2.3. Descripción del corpus, 2.4. Codificación de los datos, 2.5. Análisis estadístico; 3. Resultados y análisis, 3.1. Panorama general, 3.2. Variable de la especificidad cultural; Conclusiones; Referencias bibliográficas. INTRODUCTION An essential component of the culture of a country, a region or any other territory is its gastronomy. Moreover, one of the most important attractions to promote a tourist destination is also related to its cuisine. If this is true about any country or region in the world, it is particularly so in the case of Spain, Andalusia or Malaga. It is, therefore, interesting to study the translation of menus, as the image a given place wants to project outside depends on its culinary offer to a great extent. In this sense, the main objective of the present paper is to analyse the translation solutions adopted to translate the dishes in the menus of eighty restaurants in four tourist destinations of Malaga province, namely the capital of the province, also called Malaga, Torremolinos, Benalmádena and Marbella. Names of dishes, like any term of food and drink, may be considered culture-bound terms or cultural references. The approach adopted in this study focuses on the translation of cultural references and analyses whether the translation solutions used are more oriented towards the source culture or towards the target culture. In addition, although several translation errors have been identified throughout the corpus, the approach, rather than being prescriptive, is a descriptive one. It is not an aim of this study, then, to assess the target versions of the source menus, to judge whether a given translation solution is more or less appropriate to translate a given dish or to spot and classify the errors found in the different menus that constitute the corpus of study. A literature review focusing on the translation of terms of food and drink is presented in section 2, which is divided into two subsections, respectively devoted to the translation of terms of food in both literary and audiovisual texts (2.1) and to the translation of these terms in restaurant menus (2.2). Section 3, in turn, contains a description of the methodological aspects of this study, including the formulation of the aims On the translation of culinary terms 137 HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X of the study (3.1), the research hypotheses (3.2), the description of the corpus (3.3), the encoding of the collected data (3.4) and, finally, the statistical independence test applied to the data, namely the chi-square test (3.5). The results, together with their interpretation, are offered in section 4, by presenting a general overview (4.1) followed by the analysis of the culture specificity variable in subsection 4.2. Last but not least, section 5 is concerned with the concluding remarks which close the paper. 1. ON THE TRANSLATION OF TERMS OF FOOD AND DRINK 1. 1. Translation of terms of food in literary and audiovisual texts The connection between food and the cultural identity of any country or territory is something obvious and has been highlighted on several occasions (Chiaro and Rossato, 2015, p. 237; Fuentes-Luque, 2017, p. 177; Garzone, 2017, p. 214; Cavaliere, 2018, p. 9). That said, the relationship between culture, food and translation in literary and audiovisual texts has not received much research attention, as signalled by Chiaro and Rossato (2015, p. 237), Graziano (2017, p. 100) and Cavaliere (2018, p. 7). Amongst the studies focusing on the translation of culinary references, González-Vera (2015) analyses the translation of food terms in animated films such as those of the Shrek saga, The Princess and the Frog and Brave. The results of this study indicate that in general, there is a slight tendency to opt for translation techniques oriented towards the source language. Also focusing on audiovisual translation, Cavaliere (2018) –a corpusbased study on 25 films– departs from the research hypothesis that the more recent the film, the more frequently subtitlers resort to foreignising translation solutions. The results of the study confirm this research hypothesis. Vidal-Claramonte and Faber (2017) assert that mestizo writers, such as Gloria Anzaldúa, Esmeralda Santiago or Chimamanda Adichie, write food-related words from the colonised culture in their ‘minor’ language, “so as to reclaim its values as a challenge to the status quo” (Vidal Claramonte and Faber, 2017, p. 189). Oster and Molés-Cases (2016) is also a study based on a literary corpus and dealing with food-related translation difficulties. Among the aspects researched, the study delves into the translation of culture-specific dishes and drinks from Germany and Austria into both Spanish and 138 Francisco Javier Díaz-Pérez HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X Catalan. The corpus on which the study is based consists of the German- Spanish and the German-Catalan sections of the COVALT corpus, a multilingual corpus of narrative works originally written in English, German and French and of their Catalan and Spanish translations. Another section of the COVALT corpus, specifically the English- Catalan one, is the basis of Marco (2019), a study which has as its two main aims to analyse the translation techniques used for the translation of food-related culture-specific items and to investigate the factors which condition the selection of translation techniques. As compared with the results of Oster and Molés-Cases (2016), in Marco (2019) the presence of foreignising techniques is higher, whereas neutralising and domesticating techniques are more frequent in Oster and Molés-Cases (2016). 1. 2. Menu translation As highlighted by Fuentes-Luque (2017, p. 178), tourist translation in general and menu translation in particular have been much-neglected research areas in the field of translation studies. Similarly, Saihong (2019, p. 1) states that menu translation is a “peripheral area” of both translation studies and professional translation. In spite of this academic negligence, there are certain studies which focus on the recourse to domesticating versus foreignising translation solutions, such as Siran (2008), Amir Dabbaghian (2014) and Petronienė, Murauskaitė and Horbačauskienė (2019), as well as some other studies which deal with quality in menu translation, as is the case of Fallada Pouget (1999), Fallada Pouget (2005), Hrubá (2015), Fuentes-Luque (2017) or Chłopicki (2018). Finally, a third group of studies, including Vorajaroensri (2002), Graziano (2017) and Saihong (2019), centred on the translation strategies and procedures resorted to by menu translators. Amongst those studies analysing recourse to domestication versus foreignisation, Siran (2008) concludes that the use of either domesticating or foreignising strategies will be determined by the type and function of the text. Thus, in the case of menu translation, the need to be understood by the addressee will compel the translator to opt for domestication. For instance, in one of the menus, as Siran (2008, p. 25) says, calamares a la andaluza (“Andalusian-style squid”) is translated into Chinese as 炸鱿鱼 (“grilled squid”), from which the origin of the dish disappears and the way On the translation of culinary terms 139 HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X of cooking is assimilated to that of a well-known dish in China which also has squid as its main ingredient. Likewise, in a different menu, sangría is translated as 香格里拉 (“Shangri-la”), which is quite similar to the sourcetext counterpart from a phonetic point of view, but which is completely different if its content is considered, as the target-text version refers to a place in the Himalayas with wonderful landscapes and where time seems to have stopped. It is also true, however, as Siran (2008. p. 27) says, that translators may also occasionally decide to favour foreignisation to endow the menu with an exotic touch. Siran’s conclusions do not coincide with the results of this study, partly because he focuses on cases in which Chinese is either the source or the target language and the other language is a western one, either English or Spanish. The cultural and linguistic gap in Siran’s study is, therefore, much wider than in the present study. Amir Dabbaghian (2014), in turn, concentrates on the translation of Iranian menus into English. Unlike Siran (2008), Amir Dabbaghian (2014) has found that, in his corpus of examples from Persian into English, the majority of dish names have been translated by means of foreignisation in order to maintain the original Iranian cultural undertones. In AmirDabbaghian’s view, globalisation as well as a more and more extended use of the Internet have facilitated communication among people belonging to different cultures and have resulted in an increasing eagerness to get acquainted with exotic and foreign cultures. In this author’s opinion, foreignisation is a better choice, whereas domestication would be, in his view, a supplement to it. Petronienė, Murauskaitė, and Horbačauskienė (2019) analyse the translation of culture-specific items in menus of Lithuanian restaurants into English. The results of their study indicate that names of Lithuanian dishes tend to be translated by means of solutions which maintain the content of the original culture-specific item or that neutralise cultural references, whereas names of international dishes tend to be translated by means of solutions which keep the form of the cultural reference or that replace it by another cultural reference. As an example of a Lithuanian dish translated by means of preservation of content, Petronienė, Murauskaitė and Horbačauskienė (2019, p. 188) provide bulvių blynai and raugintų kopūstų sriuba, which are respectively rendered as potato pancakes and sauerkraut soup. The fact that Lithuanian dishes are not well-known by 140 Francisco Javier Díaz-Pérez HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X the target addressees of the translated menus, while international dishes are more recognizable by tourists, might explain, according to the authors of this study, this difference in the choice of translation solutions. What these authors call localization, which involves replacing one cultural reference with another, is more frequently used to translate foreign dishes (from a Lithuanian perspective) because it is easier for the translator to find their cultural counterparts. In addition, the target addressees will be familiar with the name of the dish in the target text. The translation of Austriškas pyragas (“Austrian cake”) as Strudel allows Petronienė, Murauskaitė and Horbačauskienė (2019, p. 189) to illustrate this translation solution. Regarding the studies which deal with the quality of menu translation, Fallada Pouget (1999), Fallada Pouget (2005) and Fuentes-Luque (2017) coincide in emphasising the importance of high-quality translated menus not only for restaurant businesses but also for the promotion of tourist destinations. In Fallada Pouget’s (1999, p. 127) words, “an improvement in the quality of the translations may lead to higher standards of service and better socio-cultural exchanges.” However, in spite of the risks implied by poor quality translated menus, a tendency has been observed to commission menu translation to non-professional translators, as highlighted more than once (Fallada Pouget, 1999, p. 132; Fallada Pouget, 2005, p. 96; Hrubá, 2015, p. 31; Fuentes-Luque, 2017, p. 180; Chłopicki, 2018, p. 159). In fact, Fallada Pouget (1999, p. 132) has found that in her corpus of menus from the Tarragona area, in Catalonia, there is a clear difference between those menus translated in the 1970s and in the 1980s, commissioned to professional translators, as opposed to other menus translated in the 1990s, which were entrusted to non-professional translators. Therefore, contrary to what might be expected, the results of the study show that in a period of twenty years there was a decline in the quality of translated menus. An additional result of this study is that the books containing multilingual glossaries for restaurants and bars published by the Catalan government, the Generalitat de Catalunya, did not fulfil their objective, as they were not used by restaurant owners, the immense majority of whom did not even know these tools existed. In a later paper, Fallada Pouget (2005, p. 99) maintains that the Catalan government should move away from a unidirectional model in which the Catalan language and On the translation of culinary terms 141 HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X culture are the only source language and culture towards a multidirectional model in which other languages and cultures are not only target languages and cultures, but also source ones. Examples of the unidirectional model are the Vocabulari de restaurants and the Vocabulari de bars i restaurants-bar, whereas the only exception to the unidirectional model is the Lèxic de menjars xinesos.1 In Fallada Pouget’s (2005, p. 98) opinion, this change of model would be justified by the increase in immigrants arriving in Catalonia who decide to establish restaurants offering a gastronomy typical of their countries of origin. With regard to the quality of English translations of Czech menus, Hrubá (2015, p. 49) states that these English target texts are full of mistakes which very often result in providing potential customers with misleading information. Moreover, in those cases in which Czech original names are used in the English versions of the menus, no clear explanation is provided for the addressee to understand what the dish or the drink consists of. It is concluded that good restaurants should have at their customers’ disposal appealing menus providing understandable information about the dishes and drinks offered. Fuentes-Luque (2017, p. 180) also warns of the consequences of poorquality menu translations, ranging from laughter to misunderstandings which may have negative effects not only on the restaurants but on the tourist destination as a whole and, hence, on the local economy. Among the mistakes found in the English translations of 117 Spanish menus, Fuentes-Luque (2017, p. 185) mentions, for instance, the rendering of carabineros a la plancha (“grilled scarlet shrimp”) as grilled Italian policemen, from carabinieri, the name of one of the Italian police bodies. Chłopicki (2018), who focuses on the translation of menus from Polish restaurants into English, states that the high degree of unsuccessfulness of menu translation deserves to be analysed and explained. Part of the explanation is related to the fact that restaurant managers do not seem to be aware of the importance of commissioning the translation of their menus to qualified and professional translators. 1 Two of these publications may be downloaded from the Generalitat de Catalunya web site: http://empresa.gencat.cat/web/.content/02_-_llengua_catalana/documents/arxius/do c_24838207_1.pdf ; https://drac.cultura.gencat.cat/handle/20.500.12368/10536?localeattribute=es#page=1 142 Francisco Javier Díaz-Pérez HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X According to Chłopicki (2018, p. 160), there are four criteria to be relied on when dealing with menu translation, namely comprehensibility, completeness, economy and carefulness. The corpus of study in Vorajaroensri (2002) consists of forty Thai restaurant menus from Bangkok. The results of the study show that the restaurant class did not have an effect on the choice of translation strategy. Thus, in the four classes the restaurants were divided into, the most frequent strategies were the same: cultural substitution, literal translation and loan word followed by an explanation. In Graziano (2017), the purpose is to analyse the translation strategies resorted to in a hundred restaurant menus from the Italian region of Lazio. It is concluded that whereas the Slow Food philosophy is a tendency which may be observed in the source text menus which form the corpus of study, the notion of Slow Language/Translation (Cronin, 2015; Cronin, 2017) is not reflected at all. In Saihong (2018), in turn, the objective is to identify the translation strategies employed to render the names of 3000 Chinese dishes into English and to evaluate if the identified strategies are effective. In Saihong’s (2018, p. 18) words, “(m)enus ideally need to achieve a balance between informing consumers of the ingredients, methods and preparation methods of given dishes, and enabling a dish to transcend its physical characteristics by accentuating the cultural uniqueness in its name.” She also advocates for a multimodal approach to improve the translation of the names and contents of sophisticated and culture-specific dishes. 2. METHODOLOGY 2. 1. Objectives As said above, the main objective of this paper involves analysing the translation solutions adopted to translate terms of food and drink in a corpus of restaurant menus in Malaga province. Additionally, a more specific objective is to study whether the culture-specificity variable had an effect on the choice of translation solution. In other words, this study seeks to determine whether there is a significant difference between culture-specific items and the rest of names of dishes and drinks with On the translation of culinary terms 143 HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X regard to the adoption of translation solutions to render them in the English versions of the menus which compose the corpus of study. 2. 2. Research hypotheses The investigation carried out in this study begins with three research hypotheses, which may be formulated as follows: 1. The translation solutions adopted to translate the names of dishes and drinks in the restaurant menus which constitute the corpus of this study will be more oriented towards the source culture; 2. The culture-specificity variable will have an effect on the choice of translation solution; 3. In the translation of those names of dishes and drinks which are culturespecific items, the orientation towards the source culture will be more evident. The encoding and analysis of the data from the corpus will make it possible to confirm or refute these three hypotheses, and the application of the independence test described in section 3.5 will help to determine whether the second research hypothesis above may be confirmed or not. 2. 3. Description of the corpus The corpus of this study has been manually collected by the researcher and consists of 1,436 terms of food in Spanish and their translation into English from the menus of 80 restaurants in Malaga province. The restaurants are located in four very well-known tourist destinations: the capital of the province –Malaga– and three municipalities in Costa del Sol, namely Benalmádena, Marbella and Torremolinos. Amongst the 1,436 source text terms, there are names of dishes (the immense majority), some desserts and a drink, the famous Spanish cocktail consisting of red wine diluted with different drinks, sweetened and mixed with fruit, known as sangría. Moreover, the majority of the terms, specifically 1,082, are what Franco Aixelá (1996) called culture-specific items, that is to say, 150 Francisco Javier Díaz-Pérez HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X (18) croquetas de puchero → Grandma’s croquettes (Buenavista/ Malaga/74) (19) ensaladilla rusa con langostinos → Spanish potatoes with prawns (La Reserva de Antonio/Torremolinos/940) It may be observed that in 30.2% of the cases, two translation solutions are combined to translate a dish name. In all these cases, one of the translation solutions is either exoticism or cultural borrowing. This finding could be linked in part to the translators’ desire to make sure that the target audience understood the meaning of those terms which were kept in Spanish. This intention may also be pursued by means of the inclusion of pictures which portray a certain dish and may give potential consumers an idea about what the dish consists of. In this respect, figure 2 is a visual support for sardines (espeto) in one of the restaurant menus of the corpus of study.4 If the percentage corresponding to the different combinations of translation solutions is added to those represented by exoticism and cultural borrowing when used in isolation, then in 36% of the translated dishes some lexical term appears in Spanish. The fact that gastronomy is closely related to the culture of a given place may explain this observed tendency. There are other cases, however, in which the translators resorted to translation solutions which avoid maintaining any term in the source language for the sake of communicating the target-text dish name to the target audience in a more comprehensive way. These translation solutions, from the most source-culture oriented to the most target-culture-oriented, include calque –as in (10) and (11) above–, generalisation –illustrated by (20) and (21)–, explanation –as in (22) and (23)–, communicative translation –see (18) and (19) above– and cultural transplantation, exemplified by (24) and (25). (20) presa ibérica → pork (Pochos/Benalmádena/1289) (21) chanquetes → small fish (La Viborilla/Benalmádena/1147) 4 The restaurant corresponding to the menu in which this image is included, portrayed in figure 2, is Chiringuito El Cachalote, from Malaga (https://chiringuitoelcacha lote.com/menu/). On the translation of culinary terms 151 HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X (22) flamenquín → pork fillet rolled up with ham (Mesón Antonio/ Malaga/219) (23) tocino de cielo → egg and syrup pudding (La Jábega/ Torremolinos/928) (24) bacalao con pisto → cod with ratatouille (Los Marfiles/Malaga/584) (25) tortita de camarones → shrimp pancake (El Dorado/ Torremolinos/841) Fig. 2. Image of sardines (espeto) in the Chiringuito El Cachalote menu 3. 2. Culture-specificity variable The results related to translation-solution choices across culture specificity are portrayed in table 2 and graph 2. Even though the commonest translation solution is the same for culture-specific items and the rest of cultural references, namely calque, this is the only coincidence between one type of term and the other. To begin with, the percentage that this translation solution represents in culture-specific items (19.8%) is much lower than for the rest of cultural references (59.5%). Moreover, in the case of culture-specific items there is a higher tendency to adopt translation solutions oriented towards the source culture, which confirms research hypothesis 3. In this sense, if we add the percentages corresponding to exoticism and cultural borrowing –the two most sourceculture oriented solutions– combined or not with other translation 152 Francisco Javier Díaz-Pérez HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X solutions, the result is 44.8% in the case of the culture-specific items, whereas it goes down to only 4% in the rest of dish names. The communicative translation solution, which is more oriented towards the target culture than exoticism, cultural borrowing or calque, represents 16% for culture-specific items, while the percentage is almost twice that for the other cultural references, or 29.7%. This observed difference comes to confirm the more evident source-culture orientation in the translation of culture-specific items when compared with the rest of the items of the corpus. Graph 2. Translation solutions across culture specificity Translation solution CSI Non-CSI N % N % Calque 213 19.7 202 57.2 Communicative translation 173 16 105 29.7 On the translation of culinary terms 153 HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X Explanation 102 9.4 6 1.7 Generalisation 69 6.4 11 3.1 Exoticism 61 5.6 4 1.1 Cultural transplantation 20 1.8 3 0.8 Cultural borrowing 17 1.6 0 0 Calque + exoticism 209 19.3 6 1.7 Exoticism + explanation 99 9.1 4 1.1 Exoticism + com. translation 36 3.3 0 0 Calque + cultural borrowing 63 5.8 0 0 Cultural borrowing + explanation 17 1.6 0 0 TOTAL 1,082 100 353 100 Table 2. Translation solutions across culture specificity Test Statistic Df P-value Chi-Square 327.821 14 0.0000 Table 3. χ2 test for culture specificity by translation solution As proved by the statistical analysis carried out in this study and as hypothesised above (research hypothesis 2), the variable analysed in this study has been found to affect the choice of translation solution. What the results presented above (graph 2 and table 2) show is that there is a relation between the culture-specificity and the translation solution variables. In other words, the fact that the name of dish or drink is or is not a culturespecific item will condition the choice of translation solution. In fact, the independence statistical test applied to the data –the chi-square test– has 154 Francisco Javier Díaz-Pérez HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X proved that the analysed variables are dependent (see table 3). As the P- value is less than 0.05, it can be stated at 95% confidence level that the values of the translation solution variable are conditioned by the values of the culture-specificity variable. The results of the test make it possible, then, to reject the null hypothesis, which implies that in this case, the differences in the choice of translation solution for culture-specific items and for the rest of cultural references are not due to chance. In those cases in which the name of the dish or the drink has become a loan in English and can therefore be found in monolingual English dictionaries, the translation solution which consists in leaving the term in the source language has been called cultural borrowing, as mentioned above. It has been the solution selected in the immense majority of cases in which the food and drink terms are Spanish loans in the English language, in our corpus, paella, gazpacho and sangria. Whenever the term paella appears in the name of a dish, translators adopt cultural borrowing, normally in combination with another translation solution, mainly calque. Of the twenty-nine occurrences of gazpacho, 24 (82.8%) have been translated by means of cultural borrowing with or without the support of an additional translation solution. Thus, in example (26) the cultural borrowing solution has been adopted on its own, whereas in examples (27) and (28) it has been used together with calque and explanation respectively. Example (29), on the contrary, is one of the few cases in which the term gazpacho has been translated by means of a different translation solution, explanation in this case. Due to its very nature, the cultural borrowing translation solution is not –and in fact cannot– be used to translate dish names which are not or do not include culture-specific items. (26) gazpacho andaluz → gazpacho (El Dorado/Torremolinos/857) (27) gazpacho andaluz → Andalusian gazpacho (La Jábega/ Torremolinos/906) (28) gazpacho andaluz → gazpacho: cold tomato soup (La Niña/ Benalmádena/1191) (29) gazpacho andaluz → Andalusian cold tomato soup (El Cachalote/Malaga/118) On the translation of culinary terms 155 HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X CONCLUSIONS As highlighted in this paper, restaurant menus are paramount for promoting the gastronomy of a given place, be it a village, town, region or country. Since gastronomy is very closely related to culture and often considered as one of the most important elements for attracting potential visitors, the role of restaurant menus in the promotion of tourist destinations cannot be denied. From that perspective, menus have an obvious advertising function. However, together with that advertising function, they also have the evident purpose of providing information about the different dishes contained in them. This dual function – persuasive and informative– is reflected in the translation solutions adopted to render the dish names in the target text. In this sense, resorting to source-culture-biased translation solutions in which the source language is present in the target text helps to endow the text with an exotic tone which could make it more attractive. However, as these foreignising solutions may hinder comprehensibility, more often than not, translators combine them with other solutions more oriented towards the target culture. It is this need to put the target text to the service of the informative function that also explains the use of solutions such as communicative translation or cultural transplantation, occasional as the latter solution may be. All in all, the most frequent solution in the whole corpus has been found to be calque, followed by communicative translation. It is not strange that calque is the commonest solution in the whole corpus. By means of this translation solution the content of the dish name is kept in the target text, as the term is translated word for word, but as that content is expressed in the target language, it is also brought closer to the target reader in such a way that comprehensibility is ensured. The relatively high frequency of the communicative translation solution may be explained by a willingness to bring the target text (the translated menu) as close as possible to the target audience, even if it implies a change in the content of the culinary term or a cultural decontextualisation. Recourse to combinations of two different translation solutions is also very frequent, particularly when one of the solutions involves leaving the lexical item in the source language. In those cases, the translation solution involving the presence of the source language in the target text –exoticism or cultural borrowing– is combined with translation solutions such as calque, explanation or communicative translation. The purpose of this procedure 156 Francisco Javier Díaz-Pérez HERMĒNEUS, 26 (2024): págs. 135-159 ISSN: 2530-609X is very often to ensure the comprehensibility of the translated menus by the target addressee. The variable analysed in this study, namely culture specificity, has been proved to be related to the choice of translation solution. Thus, as might be expected, the translation solutions adopted to render culturespecific items are more source-culture biased than the solutions chosen to translate other dish names. 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