Activating Sensory Modalities: Translating (or not)

The present paper illustrates and discusses decisions made by the translator when rendering the texture and the taste of Bosnian-Herzegovinian traditional drinks into English, as described in The Bosnian Cuisine (2016), which, apart from collected recipes, contains excerpts from travelogues and literary works. In the paper, I refer to the adjective and the noun phrase equivalence or the lack of equivalence thereof in the English language, whereas special attention is given to using footnotes and brackets in translation, as well as to the negotiation process between the translator and the proofreader whose L1 is English. Based on corpus analysis, it can be concluded that the majority of decisions made regarding the nouns denoting traditional dishes were made to preserve the original names and to resort to footnotes and/or bracketing in order to render the reading experience and sensory modalities more accessible to readers, bearing in mind that they may not have tasted or seen the drinks mentioned, but also taking into consideration the wider socio-cultural context.