Translated English Food Articles for a Bilingual Magazine in the Urban Context of Chiang Mai

Abstract

The study aims to explore the ways in which translated food articles in a bilingual magazine are translated from Thai into English. The research question is: What are the ways in which translators translate food articles from Thai into English and to what extent, in the urban context of Chiang Mai? The source material of the research consists of food articles from the 2019 Spoon & Fork Magazine. Through the concept of rewriting in the systems, the study compares source-text and target-text paragraphs to discover the ways in which translators treat source-text social and cultural elements that are specific to the Thai source texts, such as foods, activities, locations and so on into the English versions. The findings illustrate that the English translations appear as rewriting and are largely shorter than the original versions. The translators retain social and cultural elements considered major while, at the same time condensing others seen as minor in the narratives. From the systems point of view, this may result from the constraints, such as target readership and the convention of the text genre.