Food Allergy Wordlists

Over at News-Medical.net (what, all the MedicalNews domains were taken?) is an article featuring wordlists with 200 terms needed for international travelers.

Researchers and students at Wageningen University in the Netherlands have translated the names of allergenic food ingredients into most European languages and a number of international languages such as Japanese, Chinese, Indonesian, Arabic and Swahili. The list is available at www.food-info.net/allergy.htm.

The initiators of Food-info.net and EFFoST (European Federation of Food Science and Technology) provide these wordlists for people with an allergy or intolerance for certain foods. The list includes more than 200 ingredients such as lactose, hazelnuts, shellfish, soya and gluten, sorted into categories (dairy, nuts, spices, additives etc). The wordlists can be downloaded as PDF files and offers translations from almost any language into thirty other languages, so that nearly 700 language combinations are currently available. Travellers planning to pass through Denmark, Sweden and Finland, for example, can get translations from German into all three languages, as well as between the three languages (e.g. from Finnish to Danish) and from these languages into Dutch, English or any other language in the database.

The process at Food-info.net took me a minute to figure out.

If you want to translate another language into English, you click on the link for that language and it takes you down the page to a drop-down menu under the flag for that nation. (You can scroll down directly to the flag if you want.) You find the English listing in the menu and highlight it. You will automatically be taken to another screen with a two-page .pdf of the wordlist.

To translate from English, go to the first flag (which is Britain's) and bring up the language of choice. It will then take you to the new screen with the new wordlist.