ARTICLES
| Who ordered the oven-baked joint?: Menu translation for restaurants. |
September 13, 2004 -- Brett Jocelyn Epstein and Daniel Elander are translators who specialize in, among other things, food. Elander says, “It is truly essential for restaurants to have well-translated menus or websites. We’ve seen restaurants here in Scandinavia that claim to serve ‘rabbit on whipped cream,’ ‘oven-baked joint,’ and ‘cheese with accomplishments.’ Sure, customers might laugh at these bad translations, but they could also be confused or annoyed and the fact remains that they might choose to go elsewhere to eat. If a restaurant doesn’t convey a professional impression immediately, that restaurant has just lost some potential customers. We’re eager to help restaurants prevent this from happening.”
Epstein and Elander, who translate primarily between Swedish and English but also work at times with Danish, are experienced in both writing about food and in translating restaurant menus, websites, and press materials. “Our interest in food and our realization that too many people wrongly assume that it’s good enough for a menu to be more or less comprehensible, is what led us to offer this special restaurant service within our larger translation business,” Epstein says. “One of our favorite assignments is translating menus from Swedish to English and we always keep our promise to have the menu translated within forty-eight hours. Menu translation occasionally involves a little fascinating detective work. A gourmet restaurant might include some unusual ingredients on its menu or a place that specializes in traditional foods might use an old-fashioned name or concept and so we have to track down, or sometimes even create, the equivalent word or description in English. It’s a lot of fun and it’s also great to know we’re helping businesses with this work.”
Please see http://www.brettdaniel.net/ for more information.
This article courtesy of http://www.dietforslim.net/.
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