Why don’t the Italians ask me to translate their restaurant menus?

When we bought the farmhouse in Tuscany, where I am now, more than 40 years ago, there were only two restaurants within a five-mile radius and neither of them was much good. And being in the unfashionable province of Arezzo, as opposed to the then already popular Chianti region between Siena and Florence, there were few foreigners among their patrons, so they published their menus only in Italian. But 40 years have brought many changes. Many foreigners priced out of the Chianti region have bought houses here, foreign tourism has increased dramatically, and new restaurants have sprung up all over the place. And now it is very hard to find a restaurant that doesn’t publish its menu in English as well as Italian. The amazing thing, however, is how ridiculously bad these English translations of Italian dishes usually are.

In some ways this is rather comforting. We are so used to the idea of world domination by the English language that it’s good to discover that an awful lot of people can’t speak it at all or, at any rate, can’t speak it comprehensibly. You get the feeling that the restaurants don’t even actually care whether their English-speaking customers understand their menus or not. The translations may possibly be there just to give an aura of sophistication and internationalism to a very provincial enterprise. Occasionally I have tentatively offered the owners of restaurants I frequent to edit these translations so as to render them slightly more intelligible, but such offers have always been briskly brushed aside. The owner will assure me that he has a son or daughter or other relation studying English at college and so has no need of any outside help.

The other night I was browsing the menu in a rather good country restaurant near here, one popular with Dutch tourists who holiday in a camp close by (what the Tuscans like to call agriturismo), and was wondering whether to order as my main course stracotto alla chiantigina, which, as you probably know, is a piece of beef cooked over a low heat with Chianti wine for five hours until you can cut it with a fork.