Strategies for translating Portuguese culinary into French: The case of dish names on websites

The total social fact that cooking represents, and the culinary practices associated with it and which are transmitted in particular by the recipes, are bearers of cultural values, and these are also present in different media. In this respect, websites featuring Portuguese cooking recipes in French can be taken as interesting vehicles of Culture-Specific Items (CSI) (Franco Aixelá, 1996), which remain a challenge in the process of cultural transmission and therefore of translation. Of the various parts of a recipe, the one that is the focus of this study is the title, the name of the dish. Although it is concise, easy to remember and to find in a list or index, its primary function is to name a very particular practice in which the cultural aspect is fundamental. This is where the difficulty lies in translating certain names of dishes, which are sometimes quite difficult to obtain but also not necessarily desirable, at the risk of losing the historical and cultural dimension of the term. One question that arises is why some recipe names remain untranslated, and are all these untranslated words left for the same reasons? This article focuses on these culture-specific items in two French-language Portuguese cooking websites and what translating strategies are present on the one hand and, on the other, on the cultural factors that govern this need to adapt them to readers. In terms of method, after an initial theoretical reflection on the cultural specificities of gastronomic discourse, we present a state of translational research on the transposition of cultural aspects in general (Molina & Albir 2002) and in the audiovisual field (Naulin 2014). Then, these culture-specific items in Portuguese are listed, along with the procedures followed to establish a typology of translator strategies used for the names of Portuguese dishes in the French versions of these recipes.