What's Cooking in English Culinary Texts? Insights from Genre Corpora for Cookbook and Menu Writers and Translators

Cookery books do not merely call for a language expert; they are governed by their own laws not only in the choice of vocabulary and fixed expressions, but also grammar and style. Their translations should accordingly not only be linguistically impeccable and technically accurate, but also read as if written by a professional. This paper offers new insights into the translation norms and conventions of cookbooks and recipes by discussing how corpus tools can help choose the most appropriate collocation or turn of phrase and validate hypotheses concerning crucial but non-salient choices at the lexical, syntactic, stylistic, spelling and punctuation level. We anchor the discussion in translation theory, reviewing the realities and inevitability of retour translation (translation into the L2). Several features of British and American culinary texts are described and different categories of snares lurking for the translator outlined with the help of a rich corpus (1m tokens, <12k types), key characteristics of English-language recipes discussed, and numerous concrete examples vindicating the brownie points gained through analyses of recipe websites and cookery software in ways different from those envisaged by their creators in teaching ESP and specialized translation presented from the author’s over decade-long experience.