Brazilian recipes in portuguese and english: the role of phraseology for translation

Abstract

Although recurrent in TV shows, blogs and magazines, not to mention in a number of cookbooks, culinary texts, including recipes, restaurant reviews and menus, remain academically underexplored. As a matter of fact, according to Capatti and Montanari [4] this textual genre has long been considered inferior to literature and other arts. As a consequence, the area suffers from scarcity of reference materials, especially with regard to the Portuguese-English language pair, which surely has a significant impact on translation. Analyses of translated texts show misleading choices of terms and adaptations that result in de-characterization of cultural references and mistranslations. Moreover, in isolation terms are, in general, insufficient to guarantee fluent texts. Specialized phraseologies are also essential for writing and translating texts. Using corpus linguistics as our methodology, this study aims to identify typical phraseologies used in Brazilian recipes and propose functional equivalents in English. In order to reach our objectives, we built a comparable corpus of Brazilian cuisine cookbooks written originally in Brazilian Portuguese and in North-American English. Results show that appropriate translation goes far beyond prima facie equivalents. We believe that linguistic and cultural differences should be taken into account when creating culinary reference material directed at translators and writers working with this genre.