Are Menu Translations Getting Worse?

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.