When “To Cook Dog” Becomes “Ragoût de Chien” – Reclaiming the Language of Recipes in the French

The translation of cooking recipes is always a challenge irrespective of the source and target language. However, this becomes even more challenging when the source text is set against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, Versailles, and the French Revolution. Jonathan Grimwood’s The Last Banquet proves to be an epic story of one man’s quest to know the world through its many and marvelous flavors. So, although the source language is English, the setting is French and since the book is replete with all sorts of sometimes mouthwatering, sometimes macabre dishes (“Three Snake Bouillabaisse” or “Pickled Wolf’s Heart”), the French translator is faced with the difficult challenge of French food that has to be translated from English. The present article is, consequently, going to look into the translation of this book into French, and argue that the French translator opted for a re-domestication or perhaps a reclaiming of food terminology. The translator’s choice here is to reclaim the French food culture, obviously“superior” to the Anglo-Saxon one, by enriching and re-appropriating the food-related language of the English source text. To show that this is strictly the translator’s choice for French, the corpus will extend to the Spanish translation of the novel, which turns out to be more loyal to the source text.