ISSN 1392-0588 DARBAI ir DIENOS 2006.45 Jûratë RUZAITË INTRODUCTION Translations of restaurant menus are important for very practical reasons. A professionally translated menu can im- prove the service quality in restaurants and can help to avoid intercultural mis- communication. A menu serves as an informative text that provides details about the food served in a restaurant; more importantly, a menu not only pre- sents information, but also represents the restaurant by shaping customers im- pressions about the place. In this sense, menus are a means of advertising and are appellative in their nature. In addi- tion, menus represent a country and its culture. Thus the importance of menus is predetermined by the purpose and the functions that such a text type per- forms. Therefore, this article discusses the techniques used in menu transla- tions in relation to text typology and discourse analysis. Text type is a highly contradictory and debatable term. Different linguists use other terms instead of text type, such as genre, register, discourse type to refer to similar phenomena (for an exhaustive overview of these and other related terms, see Trosborg 1997a). In this article text types are used as a broad term to refer to conventional kinds of texts used for specific communica- Text Typology in Translation A CASE STUDY OF MENU TRANSLATIONS tive situations (cf. Sager 1997). A text is said to belong to a specific text type if it has recognizable structural and rheto- rical features which condition our modes of reading a message (Sager 1997: 30). Text structures become recognizable and speakers have certain expectations for them since texts are regularly repeated in conventional communicative situations (Sager 1997: 30). Our shared knowledge about text types and prior familiarity with them help us to interpret indivi- dual texts with less effort. In this way awareness of text types is of crucial importance in communication in gener- al. In addition, text types should also be taken into account in such specific and practical enterprises as translation (cf. Steiner 1998). As Schäffner cogently ar- gues, the linguistic knowledge cannot be seen as an autonomous system, large- ly independent of socio-cultural know- ledge (1997: 137). Awareness of text types unavoidably involves socio-cultural knowledge, as will be demonstrated in the present analysis of menu translations. THE IMPORTANCE OF THE TEXT TYPE IN TRANSLATION Nowadays it is commonly agreed that equivalence in translation has to be sought not on the level of individual