How do you begin to translate 1,000 recipes?

One recipe book. Two translators. ~1,000 recipes. The mammoth task (or at least, the planning for the task) of translating my mom’s Persian food bible has begun.

My mom originally gave me her copy of this book, a chunky leather-bound recipe book packed with classic Persian recipes, to use at home. We plan to translate it, one recipe at a time. Together we're trying to figure out the process and so far, it’s been rough.

I feel like I’m at that point, at the very beginning of a giant project, when I’m trying to wrap my head around why wanting to complete this feels important to me. What am I really hoping to accomplish?

Testing translations

I started to send my mom images of the recipes, after some heavy photo editing to make them print-ready. She wanted to have them in front of her so she could physically work on them at a desk. Even before I started my blog, I’d often ask her how to make certain dishes, and she’d open the book, read through the recipe, translate it, and then say something to me like, “The book says this, but I do it differently,” and we’d go from there.

Side note: This gave me the idea to do a video series where I make my family recipe and the book recipe, comparing them and exploring what I like about each one. So stay tuned for that sometime after the summer.

We started with a translation for Ash e Anar, a Persian pomegranate soup I have on the blog. My initial plan was to run my mom’s translation of the recipe and the book page through Google Translate to see how close it would be to my mom’s—and it was a lot different than I thought it would be.

Then the recipe in the book for Ash e Jo, a Persian barley soup had a funny error Google Translate made referring to “grated curds.” I immediately thought that’s got to be Kashk. Another odd phrase was “pour and add a little hot mint.” It’s got to be mint oil, that’s the only thing that makes sense, right?

In the end, Google Translate is flawed. It struggles with Farsi, which might have to do with how vocabulary works in Farsi. My initial curiosity was whether I could send my mom a Google-translated page alongside the original text and have her edit it to make her workflow quicker and easier. For now, working from scratch is likely better, even easier.

Finding our flow

It seems like the major challenge isn’t so much in sitting down to translate; my mom is fluent and can read through the book quickly—it’s her native tongue, after all. But creating a clear workflow around the process is tricky.

With hundreds of recipes to manage, organizing and coordinating the process won’t be easy. My next step is to determine the best workflow for both myself and my mom and to figure out the best way for me to contribute to and support the project. I also need more clarity around my own purpose in this project. What purpose does translating this cookbook serve for me, the blog, and Persian food history? Does including stories about each recipe and how it can be different from one home to another have a place in what we are doing? Is the history around how ingredients or the cooking methods got to Iran and from where have a purpose?

In the messiness and uncertainty of how I want to move forward with this project, one thing is clear: I’m curious. I have a deep curiosity about the differences between the recipes in this cookbook and the ones I’ve learned from my mom, maman-joon, and aunts.

I also know I want to organize this in a way that breathes new life into this book. I want to carry it forward for the next generation of Iranian-Americans, whose parents also grew up with this book. How can I help it keep living on for them? Should I translate the entire cookbook, get a publisher, recipe-test everything, and create something more, something stand-alone? I just don’t know yet.

For now, I’m content with the uncertainty and my keen sense of curiosity. That feels like a pretty good place to start.