Restaurant Reviews in Brazil and the USA: A Feast of Cultural Differences and Their Impact on Translation

Abstract

This article shares the findings from a study aimed to create a bilingual English-Portuguese glossary of terms and collocations characteristic of restaurant reviews, especially concerning the search for transla­tion equivalents. Relying on the assumptions of corpus linguistics, we conducted both quantitative and qualitative analyses to investigate a comparable corpus of texts published in the United States and Bra­zil. The manual investigation of simple and compound keywords retrieved with Sketch Engine showed that the functional translation of texts pertaining to the genre restaurant review in that pair of languages goes far beyond terminological equivalence, since it should also consider the specificities of the genre in both languages and cultures. We observed that not only are American texts much longer than their Brazilian Portuguese counterparts, but the former are also significantly more technical than the latter. Moreover, restaurant reviews unveil a number of cultural differences when written in different languag­es for a distinct target audience. To produce texts that work properly for the target reader, the translator should be aware of the conventions of this domain in both languages and cultures before deciding what aspects should be maintained, adapted, or omitted. In addition, elements that do not recur in both lists also reveal cultural differences between texts of a similar genre. We concluded that corpora may not only help translators to interpret source language texts, but also assist them in finding solutions for the translation process.