The International Language of Food

If there is one thing that inspires more discussion around The Language Factory coffee table than words, then it is food. It's no coincidence that a group of linguists would have this shared interest - language and food are intrinsically linked. And forget about the international language of love, I think we'd all find it easier to communicate the desires of our stomachs than the desires of our hearts when abroad.

You might be surprised at how many languages you could ask for your favourite dishes in; Arabic? No problem! Japanese? Easy peasy.

I've done a little bit of research with the help of our translators to find out just how international the language of food is. Read on to see what I found out and more on the special relationship between language and food.

Of course this isn't groundbreaking research - you won't find tourists referring to their phrase books when ordering pizza in Rome. Iconic dishes like this would be lost in translation. If you take the dish out of the language then you lose the dish all together.

Any bilingual dictionary will give you a translation for fish and chips but homesick British tourists are likely to be disappointed if they ask for peixe e batata frita in a Lisbon restaurant; we Brits aren't the only ones to fry our fish and potatoes and of course there's more in the name than just the method of cooking.

Despite what your dictionary might tell you, fish and chips, like many internationally renowned dishes, is untranslatable. When I get a craving for steak frites, steak and chips just isn't going to cut the mustard.

Hamburger, pizza, spaghetti, hummus, fajita, sushi, I was pretty certain that these dishes were so well-known the world over that no translations would exist. I asked translators of ten different languages how these dishes are known in their native tongues and, aside from a few orthographical differences, my suspicions were confirmed.

The observant amongst you will have spotted the deliberate inclusion of two transliterations in my list, hummus from Arabic and sushi from Japanese. I was particularly interested to know what happened to food names when they are imported into a different script; is the pronunciation perfectly preserved or tailored to suit the foreign tongue? In Russian, Arabic, Polish and Japanese, all six of the dishes I researched are pronounced exactly as we know them.

Come to think of it, transliteration plays a major role in the international language of food and is, of course, the reason I feel much more confident ordering dim sum than haute cuisine.

What's in a name? I'm not convinced a tarte tatin by any other name would taste as sweet.

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