Complexity of food label translating
When somebody says food label, what do you think of?
Even though in general, majority of population will not throw an eye toward something like nutrition facts on the product that they buy, labelling it correctly has never been as important.
If we take a step back and look at how our mom and dad ate, what were their diets comprised of, or even another step back and what our granny and grandpa dietary habbits were, we can very easily notice the pattern. Vast majority of granny and grandpa diets was just raw food, or better yet, raw ingredients cooked at home.
That trend, atleast here in Croatia, maintained for a few generations later too, but the new patterns were starting to get more noticable. More and more people started eating processed, factory created food, only to hopefully peak with latest generations, where over 70% of our food is processed.
What any of this has to do with food labeling, you might ask? More or less everything.
As we started to create and eat more and more processed foods, general health started going down. That unfortunate trend demanded new sets of rules and regulations, to keep food industry in check, because just like any other industry, food industry will try to abuse rules in their favour, so when rules are bad, 70% or more of our diet is bad as well.
This is where labelling and nutritional declarations come in place.
Labelling of food products is the only way you can have any means of making an informed decisions whenever you are buying your food and groceries. Labelling of food is the only way you can eat healthy and be relatively sure food you buy is what you expect and want it to be.
But how do we make sure everyone in the world can make the same decisions? How do we ensure that something as essential as this is a worldwide norm?
It's not easy, every country has it's own set of rules and regulations, it's own norms.
Lucky for us, European Union set some standards for food industries within its borders, and it's the first time we have close to equal set of rules for all EU member states.
This does not mean it's easy to create labels in European Union, because even though they set particular standards, each country still maintains right to require different rules depending on many issues that come with translation of food products and their labels.
Easiest example for Croatia would be pancakes. Pancakes are american dessert, fluffy, thick, eaten with maple syrup .
We all know that and a regular translation for pancake in Croatia is „Palačinka“, but if anyone in Croatia asks you if you want to eat a palačinka, and you delightfully say yes, assuming it's a pancake, you willl certainly be surprised when you recieve a „French Crepe“ on your plate.
That right there shows how language is a barrier and how anyone translating food labels has to be very skilled and have big knowledge regarding food, culture and language they are translating the label for.
Applying European Union's set of rules to a food product which will later be on the market of many different countries is a very big demand, and even though rules are set so the standards can be the same, real world application of the same is not nearly a small task .
Experts responsible for such a job have to be „food lawyers“ - translating, implementing, and adjusting labels according to laws set by not only European Union, but the country from which the food will be aquired as much as the country where it's going to end up on the shelf.
It's balancing on a very thin line, much as regular laws, there is intepretation required, and whenever there is interpretation involved, issues will arise, and those issues need to be handled with care, becouse it's the food we eat that we're talking about.
At the end of the day, succesfull label translations will deliver a high quality information, based on both rules and regulations, as much as on culture and language of the country in case, and on top of that, information delivered will be good and accurate enough for any consumer to understand and not be fooled by a very clever marketing tricks that are never as much used on us as they are now .
We are sure translating labels sounded really simple, if you ever thought about it, but hopefully we shed some light on it, as the word simple is the exact opposite to the word that should be used for the job, which is the word complex.
