Croatian gastronomy as a reflection of culture

Abstract

Gastronomy is a part of every nation's identity and food is a very important element of culture. Each
country has its typical national dishes that are part of its cultural heritage. The names of national dishes
or gastronomic culturemes are bearers of identity and culture of a certain national or ethnic group and
also refuges for the authentic and traditional culture of each country, especially in times of
globalization (cf. Holzer 2009: 377).
In this paper, the concept of null-equivalence is defined on a lexical level and with the examples of
Croatian gastronomic culturemes. Furthermore, the basic premises of the functionalist Scopos theory
are presented. The appropriate translations are shown using the examples of the text type menu.
In the empirical part of this paper, the corpus of menus from different Croatian regions and their
translations into German are analyzed. It is also analyzed which translation methods were used in the
translations of null-equivalent Croatian gastronomic culturemes into German language and whether
the scopos of the translation is realized. It is investigated whether German translations of Croatian
gastronomic culturemes enable foreign menu users to get to know Croatian gastronomic culture. As
the menus from different Croatian regions are analyzed, the analysis shows whether there are
differences in the quality of the translations of Croatian gastronomic culturemes between the Croatian
regions.