Anyway, the purpose of this post is not to make snide comments on culinary appropriation and search engine optimisation. Rather, I am here to present a simple and – if I may say so myself – elegant solution to the aforementioned problem. The solution exploits the fact that Google Translate is now advanced enough that, with a bit of common sense (or cross-checking against other recipes if needed), most recipes can be followed in translation.
Here's an example. I read somewhere about Vietnamese egg coffee, and wanted to try it at home. Now rather than search for <Vietnamese egg coffee recipe>, what I did was:
- Go to Google Translate.
- Translate "egg coffee recipe" to Vietnamese, which gives me công thức cà phê trứng.
- Do a Google Search for <công thức cà phê trứng>.
- Click on a search result.
- Right click the page (in Chrome) and translate to English.
And here's the egg coffee we made, using this recipe. It was delicious.