Difficulties in new food phraseological units translation from Italian to Polish – the example of an Italian football column

Abstract

This paper explores the use of culinary terms by Italian sports journalists and football players and discusses the importance of food-related aspects such as food-related phraseology and new food-related phraseology, the field of foodstuffs, foodsemy, and the linguistic image of the world in foreign language teaching and translation (phraseotranslation, phraseodidactics). More specifically, this paper explores the use of such culinary terms in an Italian football column as biscotto, brodino, and mozzarella (drawn from the most popular Italian sports newspaper La Gazzetta dello Sport (1999–2019)) and their Polish equivalents: ustawiony mecz, nikogo niesatysfakcjonujący remis, strzał tylko do statystyk. The study shows that although these new phraseological units have been used by sports journalists for the last 15–20 years, they have not been included in Italian dictionaries. Moreover, the problem of phraseologization and translation of culinary terms seems to be still very rarely addressed in academic research (Sułkowska 2017). In light of this data, the author also focuces on the problem of the translation of cultural aspects and cultural elements and uses this analysis to examine the notion of ‘cultural elements’ in more detail. The linguistic image of the world is adopted as the theoretical framework. Furthermore, the paper attempts to analyze the role of Slobin’s (2005) ‘thinking for speaking’ in translation. The study shows the importance of the presence of food-related phraseology in Italian football language and Italian football chronicles as well as the relation between contrastive linguistics and applied phraseology. What is more, the data collected have not become the subject of detailed comparative terminological studies yet and the expressive words analyzed in the paper, such as biscotto, brodino and mozzarella, can be considered as terminology in the full sense of the word. The aim of the paper is to show the importance of idiomatic/ zero equivalence in translation and Italian FL didactics.