Translating for the food industry: The case of chocolate

This thesis tackles the translation of cookery books – operating specifically on How to Cook That: Crazy Sweet Creations by Ann Reardon – and focuses on its section about chocolate desserts. In the first chapter, I dissect the history of the preparation of chocolate, its major economic players, and specific laws that regulate its business. The stylistic, rhetorical, and idiomatic sides of cookbooks play a massive role when a translator approaches a technical translation such as the one presented in my thesis. Because such work does not merely call for a language expert, and given that recipe books might be governed by their own laws, as the translator, I have to not only explore strategies related to vocabulary choices and fixed expressions, but also grammar and style, and specialized knowledge of the culinary arts in both source and target cultures. The actual production of my translation, consisting in reformulating the ST into the TL, ventures into what Newmark’s metaphor suggests; the extensive “iceberg-sized” process required to achieve the desired result, of which the final translation product is just its visible tip. All endeavors are directed towards finding out if all the consulted literature on technical translations mirrors my personal translation experience and whether my specific ST, which is a cookbook, presents solely technical texts’ characteristics or not. Additionally, the objective is to determine whether the ST in question and its attributes align with the broad literacy expectations for recipes as a text genre.