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An excellent piece by @bettinamak on the politics of translation of the names of dishes as they move across cultures. Interesting to think about how this relates to translation in other aesthetic contexts (think names of books and movies). https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/889vvv/when-it-comes-to-a-recipe-whats-in-a-name
In translation theory and practice you have the tension between "domesticating" and "foreignizing" translations, a choice between rendering the surface of a text smooth rather than jagged for the reader in the new language.
I am reminded in this context of Ramanujan's famous formulation in the foreword to his translation of Samskara: that a translator seeks to translate not the text into the new language but the reader into the original language.
This is not a perfect analogy, of course. In this case, the reader in the source culture is reading alongside the reader in the target culture and is indeed staking a claim to centrality in that culture.
And unlike in literary translation, the translator is not invisible in the case of recipe writing and cookbooks and magazines. In fact, it is the translator who is the primary beneficiary of the act of translation, usually displacing the invisible "writers" in the source culture.
The analogy breaks down easily but still worth thinking about some of the connections, I think. In literary translation, for example, rarely do we insist on literal translation; but in the case of "translated" recipes we seem to often expect absolute fidelity even as they move.
Anyway, it's time for dinner now.
