Mince Pies and Cultural Translation
Perhaps you remember that online fracas a few years ago when a US website, The Spruce Eats, posted a very alarming (for Brits!) recipe for Mince Pies that apparently contained beef? Comparisons were naturally made to Rachel’s famous Beef Trifle from Friends. But did you know this confusion has history?! In this case, it seems the photographer made the assumption that “mincemeat” meant minced beef and took these stylish but rather terrifying photos!
So What is in a Mince Pie?
In England, and many parts of the English-speaking world, mince pies are a typical Christmas food. They are sweet pies made of “mincemeat”, which is a mixture of dried fruit and nuts, apple and spices, with suet or vegetable oil and sugar or syrup. Notice that mincemeat contains no meat, at least in its modern version.
History: Middle English
According to The Christmas Encyclopedia, mincemeat pie — also commonly referred to as mince pie or Christmas pie — originated in medieval England. When knights returning from the Crusades came back with newly discovered spices, they were used to spice-up bits of leftover meat and offal (from a range of animals) combined with suet, apples, sugar, raisins, and molasses. “They were about 30 to 50 percent meat in the late Tudor era,” says food historian Annie Gray, Ph.D., “the meat content dwindled slowly over the next 300 years — part of a wider process of distinguishing sweet from savory and delineating which foods sat in which course in meals.”
By the 19th century meat had disappeared from the recipe, as sweet-and-savoury became a less popular combination. Linguistically, it’s also worth remembering that in Old English, “meat” simply meant “food” (with the modern meaning of “meat” being rendered by “flesh”). So “mincemeat” was actually just “minced food”. “Minced”, meaning “cut up very fine”, is cognate with words like minute, minor, diminish and even menu.
Digression…
In the Tudor period, mincemeat pies weren’t just popular, they even played a role in the history of one of England’s most historic monasteries. During Henry VIII’s reign, he broke with the Roman Catholic Church and started seizing catholic owned properties, including religious houses — the “Dissolution of the Monasteries” started in 1536.
The abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, Richard Whiting, tried to protect his abbey from this fate by freely offering the monarch the deeds to twelve of the abbey’s richest estates. For fun — or perhaps to make a point — he inserted the deeds into the crust of a mince pie (they were usually bigger back then, for sharing) which was to be presented to the king as a Christmas gift. The abbot asked one of his trusted agents, Thomas Horner, to deliver the pie. However, while en-route Horner allegedly pulled the deeds out of the pie and kept them. Some writers claim that an old English nursery rhyme commemorates this Christmas theft »
Little Jack Horner
Sat in a corner
Eating a Christmas pie
He put in his thumb
And pulled out a plum
And said, “What a good boy am I!”
In this instance, crime did pay. Henry VIII dissolved Glastonbury Abbey and seized its assets, while Horner took possession of Mells Manor. The (last) Abbot of Glastonbury Abbey, Richard Whiting was brutally executed on an (almost certainly false) charge of treason. It is only fair to add that Horner’s descendants, still living at Mells Manor, deny this story. They claim that Thomas Horner bought the manor from the king, and that the rhyme has nothing to do with their ancestor. The truth of the matter may never be known!
Modern English
In modern English, we make a distinction between “mincemeat” (as in mince pies) and “minced meat” (as in hamburgers which are originally from Hamburg and nothing at all to do with “ham”… but that’s another story!). However, we refer to both, confusingly, as “mince”. Americans commonly call minced meat “ground meat”; where “ground” is the past participle of “grind” and nothing to do with the noun “ground”.
Some years ago I watched a Spanish television programme about English Christmas food. The translator had understood “mincemeat” to be minced meat — “carne picada” — and “mince pies” to be “meat pies”, or “pasteles de carne”. The recipe was unusual, to say the least, and the original audio included “These probably don’t look like the mince pies you are used to”. The Spanish of course came out as “These probably don’t look like the meat pies you are used to”. Indeed!
Mince Pies and Cultural Translation
This is a nice example of a fundamental problem with translation: Should you use a native speaker of the source language (the original) or the target language (the language being translated into)? The orthodox reply is that you should always use a native of the target language: a translation should read like the original and inevitably, a speaker of the target language will produce a more natural sounding text. But there is always the danger of misunderstanding a source text, as has occurred with Mince Pies!
Translating something into grammatical correct prose, but with the wrong meaning, is usually opaque or invisible to the reader or listener. It is only when translating cultural elements that the error is obvious and we get this confusion (and hilarity!). Whereas an accurate but stylistically poor translation, such as you might get from a native-speaker of the source language, is immediately obvious and gives an impression of low quality. It’s worth noting that in many contexts accuracy is actually a lot more important than style; in technical documentation for instance.
Ideally, (if budget is not a concern!) a target-language speaker should make the initial translation; which should be then carefully checked for accuracy by a bilingual source-language speaker. In QuickSilver we sometimes do draft translations from our native language and then get a native-speaker of the target language to fix any issues of style and terminology. This is the same process we use for MTPE (Machine Translation Post-Editing). Where possible we use translators who live in the country of their source language, e.g. an Italian living in the UK. This has the clear advantage that the translator probably has a better knowledge of the local culture and will, for example, have eaten a Christmas Mince Pie!
The conclusion of all of this is that (1) translation is first and foremost a cultural activity, albeit one which requires considerable linguistic knowledge and experience, and (2), that mince pies are delicious!
