CULTURE-BOUND FOOD TERMS IN A CONTRASTIVE PERSPECTIVE

What is it about?

In a linguo-cultural perspective, food terms, i.e. the names of dishes, ingredients etc., are very important units, which results from several rea- sons (cf. Swislocki 2008). Firstly, they constitute a big and varied collec- tion of words and multiword expressions. Secondly, many lexical items belonging to this group express meanings which are culture-bound, thus interesting in a contrastive approach. Among them, there are the names of national and local dishes found in a given source culture, not known to the target language users due to the fact that the foods are peculiar to the source culture. Moreover, some food terms – even those naming dishes or ingredi- ents known to target language users – may gain special connotations in the source language because of some extralinguistic factors whose influ- ence is limited to the source culture. Therefore, generally speaking, the correspondence of a given term and its target language equivalents is of complex character. The cross-linguistic equivalence of the units in question will be discussed at two levels, i.e. systematic and translational. The lexicographic descrip- tion of culture-bound food terms is difficult due to their linguo-cultural properties. For the same reasons, it can be assumed that their translation is usually complicated. The discussion of selected theoretical aspects of their interlingual correspondence will be illustrated with the analysis of Georgian and Polish examples of such names and their cross-linguistic equivalents.

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Why is it important?

The present paper aims to discuss the problem of equivalence of food terms which constitute referential lacunae, i.e. they express meanings the target language users are not familiar with. Such names tend to evoke par- ticular connotations only in source language users.

Perspectives