Peruvian Geography Translation Project

I decided to start with my assigned section for Las Siete Canastas Alimentarias because it included a lot of photo captions, which seemed like a good place to start since they're short. It wasn't long before I found my first stumbling block (and one that continues to cause confusion): food names. Some of these have easy English translations (maíz --> corn), some have translations that might suffice, but they're not well known in their English terms (tumbo --> banana passion fruit), and some don't have a translation at all (chuño --> some sort of a freeze-dried potato?). One such word that I came across was chicharrón , which is pork, and is something I personally haven't heard of or tried (bottom left photo). WordReference defines it as pork scratching or pork crackling, which both sounded rather odd to me as translations. After the first pass through I decided I would keep it as chicharrón when I handed it off to Brye to read through since it turns out...

For my first blog post, I figured that I would explain the background of this translation project before I begin to post about my individual work on the translations. Who: Three faculty members from the University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire from the Geography, Latin American Studies, and Education Departments and five students (including myself). Links to the other students' blogs can be found on the sidebar menu to the left on the homepage of this blog. Perhaps the most important "who" is Javier Pulgar Vidal, without whom we wouldn't have a book to translate. What: We seek to translate Javier Pulgar Vidal's book on Peruvian geography, Geografía del Perú: las ocho regiones naturales, from Spanish   into English. We are starting with two short chapters on the eight human groups and the seven food regions of Peru. Where: This answer comes in a few parts. We are doing our work in Eau Claire, but the book is all about Peruvian geography and was written in...