Activating Sensory Modalities: Translating (or not)

Texture and Taste of Bosnian-Herzegovinian Traditional Drinks

Abstract

The present paper illustrates and discusses decisions made by the translator when rendering the
texture and the taste of Bosnian-Herzegovinian traditional drinks into English, as described in
The Bosnian Cuisine (2016), which, apart from collected recipes, contains excerpts from
travelogues and literary works. In the paper, I refer to the adjective and the noun phrase
equivalence or the lack of equivalence thereof in the English language, whereas special attention
is given to using footnotes and brackets in translation, as well as to the negotiation process
between the translator and the proofreader whose L1 is English. Based on corpus analysis, it
can be concluded that the majority of decisions made regarding the nouns denoting traditional
dishes were made to preserve the original names and to resort to footnotes and/or bracketing in
order to render the reading experience and sensory modalities more accessible to readers, bearing
in mind that they may not have tasted or seen the drinks mentioned, but also taking into
consideration the wider socio-cultural context.