It is all-too-easy to ridicule the translations of Chinese dishes that you see in restaurants. There’s an entire blog post from BoredPanda devoted to it, in which a dish called ‘Germany Sexual Harassment’ is one of the less rude howlers.
Most of
these horrors can be attributed to restaurants (mis-)using machine translation
to create their menus. (Well, at least they tried! How many London restaurants
translate their menus for foreign visitors?) But seriously…. Finding
translations for food is a huge challenge, whether it is for a cookbook or a
novel. By definition, there are rarely exact equivalents to specialist and
local dishes anywhere in the world. And it matters. The doyenne of Chinese
cookbooks, Fuchsia Dunlop, writes: ‘Learning another
cuisine is like learning a language. In the beginning, you know nothing about
its most basic rules of grammar. You experience it as a flood of words, or
dishes, without system or structure.’ She doesn’t
underestimate the difficulties: ‘Think, for a
moment, of the words we use to describe some of the
textures most adored by Chinese gourmets: gristly, slithery, slimy, squelchy,
crunchy, gloopy. For Westerners they evoke disturbing thoughts of bodily
emissions, used handkerchiefs, abattoirs, squashed amphibians, wet feet in
wellington boots, or the flinching shock of fingering a slug when you are
picking lettuce.’ (Dunlop, Shark's Fin and
Sichuan Pepper: A sweet-sour memoir of eating in China,
2008:135)
I have never translated a whole book about food, but in Jia Pingwa’s novels, local Xi’an snacks abound. There are hundreds of them. In The SojournTeashop (Sinoist Books, 2022, forthcoming), translated by myself and Liu Jun, there are a dozen different types of noodles ( 面, mian ) alone. It clearly would not do the author or the dishes justice to translate them all simply as noodles. We had to think of ways of giving the reader an impression of each snack which managed to be vivid but did not get in the way of the story by being over-detailed. We can assume that most readers will have tasted few, if any, of these specialities – a lot of them were unfamiliar to me – but we regretfully dismissed the idea adding pictures, or links to them because this is after all, a novel not a cookbook. Here is a sample paragraph, the result of much discussion between Jun and me, from The Sojourn Teashop:
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Prosper Street is the place for
snacks. It is lined with stalls and eateries, selling mutton paomo, wonton, soup-filled tangbao
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In getting this passage into English, we chose to mix our methods. For example, we have translated: steamed dumplings; transliterated with no added explanation: hulu chicken; transliterated with a gloss: hot and numbing mala soup; and substituted a word the reader would be familiar with: wonton (actually from the Cantonese).
My co-translator Liu Jun makes an important point about food in her Translator’s Foreword for the novel: ‘[The Sojourn Teashop] … is like a mini-encyclopaedia of Chinese history, culture and society. One can catch glimpses of local snacks, learn to appreciate tea, and see how business deals are closed over dinner or mahjong.'
So, food is an integral part of a community's culture. And as with so much translating of cultural concepts, a lot of head-scratching and debate was involved. Liu Jun goes on: ‘Learning the ingredients, recipe, history and how locals eat a snack helped us find the best solution. [For instance]…a pasta called mashi (麻什), brought to China by Muslim merchants from the Middle East many centuries ago. In Turkic language, it’s called “tutmaq”. The book also describes how this pasta is made. So I used an Italian term “conchiglie”, as it’s shaped like a sea shell. But Nicky decided that rather than confusing readers with Turkic and Italian words, it’d be better to stay with the Chinese pronunciation mashi, and describe it as “cat’s ear”, its nickname in China.’
I should add that I would have been quite happy to use the term tutmaq if it had been widely accepted in English, in the way that ‘wonton’ is, but it isn’t yet. And conchiglie is problematic because tutmaq/mashi is not exactly the same animal, even though it is a similar shape.
It would be a mistake to think that only translators from Chinese have these problems. Although many words for foreign food have become common currency in the UK and other English-speaking countries (think pasta, tapas and brioche) there is still plenty to tax the translator from other languages. I recently approached Josephine Murray, a translator from French, currently completing her MA in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia (tweets as @MsJHMurray) and was delighted to get the following response:
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‘I think that readers of translated literature are increasingly accepting of words left in the original language, particularly in this globalised age when TV, film, the internet and globalisation means people are regularly exposed to foods from other countries. If an editor is concerned that leaving words untranslated could negatively impact the reading experience, a workaround is to include a glossary of those words which have been left untranslated. I think footnotes do impede the flow of reading fiction, but I think they’re fine in non-fiction. Another option is to use a one or two word translation after the source text word on first mention, and to use the original language term on subsequent mentions and rely on the reader remembering what it means. Japanese to English translator Anthony Chambers does this in the Tanizaki story ‘The Children’. On first mention of ‘oden’ he adds the English word ‘stew’ after it to suggest to the reader what kind of a dish ‘oden’ is. On subsequent mentions he leaves oden in italics. He told me this was so readers who want more information can look it up. For me this is one of the key reasons for retaining a source text word in a translation; it enables the reader to research online to find out what the food consists of, looks like and its connotations in the source culture. I translated a short story of which food was a key part for the University of East Anglia MA in Literary Translation Anthology. It’s called The Three Christmas Eve Masses, ‘Les Trois Messes Basses’, a short story from Contes du Lundi by Alphonse Daudet, published in 1873. This involved researching different types of game birds, and also finding out what a medieval roasting spit sounds like!’ [personal email]
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Finally, I couldn’t possibly sign off without telling you what Saliva Chicken and Ants Climbing Trees actually are.
According
to Chinese Food Wiki, Saliva Chicken is so called because ‘a lot of
prickly ash [Sichuan pepper] is added [to the braised chicken], and you will
feel numb of mouth and water flows out unconsciously after eating it.’ In other
words, it’s mouth-watering.
As
for Ants Climbing Trees, it’s basically vermicelli served mixed with minced
pork, the grains of which allegedly resemble ants climbing trees.
