Calling all translators! El Libro de Todos Los Moles
by E. S. Dempsey
I am working on translating El Libro de Todos los Moles by Paco Ignacio Taibo I, and am seeking fellow translators to provide feedback and advice.
The first half of El Libro de Todos los Moles is a culinary history of the Mexican dish mole. The second part is a collection of mole recipes. Lots and lots of mole recipes.
The thing is, I have never cooked Mexican other than making tortillas from masa. It is mysterious and difficult for me to translate these directions, exotic spices and methods of cooking into English.
I have created a wordpress blog about my translation project at MoleLibro.wordpress.com, and a Google+ page for discussing Spanish words and phrases that I am unsure about how to translate:
If anyone is interested in offering comments and discussing my translation, I would be grateful.
You’re going to have to learn Mexican cooking concepts and techniques. You might start with Diana Kennedy’s book From My Mexican Kitchen. If your Spanish is up to it Ricardo Munoz Z.’s Diccionario Enciclopedico de Gastronomia Mexicana will be very helpful. Also look for Guido Gomez da Silva’s Diccionario de Mexicanismos, which is on-line. Mexican dialects of kitchen Spanish have limited vocabularies and their syntaxes are rarely complex so there’s not really that much to learn. Obscure ingredients that aren’t in any of DK’s books or the Diccionario Enciclopedico are probably best solved with careful Google searches.
I have read your help request and I am so interested To do so. I am Mexican Gastronomy Historian at Mexico City, I’ve also checked your blog, but I don’t exactly understand What you want or where to start. Please, send me more information.
Hi. I am a journalist from Colombia. I think your project sounds very interesting. I would like to be part of the project. Let me know what exactly that help can be.