[Sca-cooks] Translation Criteria - long

[Robin Carroll-Mann]

On 27 Jul 2001, at 11:49, Peters, Rise J. wrote:

> I would suggest that a cooking text is probably more difficult to translate
> than a legal document.

I have no experience with legal texts, but I have done some
translating of cooking texts.  Recipes tend to have a limited,
repetitive vocabulary and simple sentence structure.  The
difficulties I have run into have been with words that have no clear
English equivalent.  "Deshecho" is one example.  It's an adjective
literally means "unmade" -- something cooked until it's falling apart.
 And there were a few idioms, but mostly I had problems finding the
right English word for certain terms.  One of the reasons I did *not*
tackle the non-recipe chapters of Nola, is that they had more
complex language and elaborate vocabulary than the recipes.

One thing that I highly recommend to would-be translators, is that
they find and use a historical dictionary in their chosen language,
not just a modern bilingual dictionary.  I would have been lost
without the 1726 dictionary of the Royal Spanish Academy, which
gives lengthy, descriptive definitions of words.  Historical
dictionaries, even if they're newer than the text you're translating,
are more likely to list archaic meanings.


Brighid ni Chiarain *** mka Robin Carroll-Mann
Barony of Settmour Swamp, East Kingdom
rcmann4 at earthlink.net