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Cuisine and restaurants are powerful tools for cultural, social and tourist image-building, and projection for tourist promotion, particularly in the case of major tourist places and destinations which boast a well-deserved, long-standing history and reputation for gastronomical beacons. When menus are not properly translated (or transcreated) into a foreign language, restaurants and destinations risk losing not only a huge market, but also damaging their image and reputation. Quality tourism requires excellent products and services, and quality professional menu translation is paramount. Linguistic and psychological aspects affect the way menus are designed, composed, written, and translated, with the aim of enticing diners. This paper aims to analyse the quality of translated restaurant menus in the southern Spanish region of Andalusia, in order to shed some light on the main types of errors found in this key type of text. An empirical study of over one hundred restaurant menus is presented through an error categorisation framework, together with surprising insights from a brief questionnaire for professional menu translators. Finally, a number of proposals and recommendations are offered for better menu translations and a much desired improvement of quality tourist texts.
Adrián Fuentes-Luque (2016) studied this question.