Translation Strategies in Translating Restaurant Menus from Turkish into English

Over the centuries translators have faced linguistic and cultural challenges between different languages and cultures. When cultural challenges taken into consideration, translating menus and food terms is a problematic issue nearly in all languages. Food names are sometimes preserved,or changed when translating them. Sometimes new words are created and ahile translating food menus, some translation strategies are used. The aim of this study is to investigate the strategies used in translation of nine restaurant menus in 4 cities in Türkiye, and to perform a comprehensive analysis of the strategies applied in the translation of food names from Turkish into English. The names of the restaurants were not given so that they could be secret. The findings reveal that the main problems of translating menus are related to proper names, culture-specific concepts and ambiguous and semantically related terms. Davies’ classification of translation strategies is used for the practical part of the research and all the instances are analyzed under seven headings: preservation, addition, omission, globalization, localization, transformation and creation. The study concludes that the attentive reading of the source text and the good knowledge of linguistic and cultural aspects of menus on the part of translators will help to solve the problems of translating food terms and to produce satisfactory target texts having no errors.