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Article published In:
Target
Vol. 12:2 (2000) ► pp.323–332

Are Menu Translations Getting Worse?

Restaurant Menus in English in the Tarragona Area

| Universitat Rovira i Virgili, Tarragona, Spain
Translations of restaurant menus from Catalan or Spanish into English are important for the Catalan restaurant industry and for tourism in general, since an improvement in the quality of the translations may lead to higher standards of service and better socio-cultural exchanges. A sample of 1013 menu items from the Tarragona area suggests there are differences in functionality between the menus translated in the 1970s/1980s and those translated in the 1990s. A possible reason for these differences is that all the menus from the 1970s/80s were translated by professional translators, and those from the 1990s, by non-professional translators. The study also suggests that books on menu translations published by the Catalan government in 1991 did not reach the restaurant owners and that official translation policy in this area has thus had little effect.
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Method
  • Results
    • Interviews with Restaurant Owners
    • Content Correspondence
    • Functionality of Menus
  • Discussion
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 4 May 2001
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.12.2.08fal
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Cited by (3)

Cited by three other publications

Darias Marrero, Agustín
2022. La traducción de cartas de restaurante en un destino turístico: un estudio de caso. Estudios de Traducción 12 ► pp. 25 ff. DOI logo
Pym, Anthony
2020. For a Sociology of Translator Training. In Translation Education [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 9 ff. DOI logo
Šuljić Petrc, Alenka, Krešimir Mikinac & Ivana Edmonds
2019.  [Tourism in Southern and Eastern Europe, ], ► pp. 689 ff. DOI logo

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