Cover not available
Part of
Pragmatics and Translation
Edited by Miriam A. Locher, Daria Dayter and Thomas C. Messerli
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 337] 2023
► pp. 281–305

Chapter 12
Chef knows best

How translations of an immigrant family’s recipes (re)construct a celebrity chef’s epistemic authority

| Georgetown University
| Amazon

Our analysis of translation, broadly understood, on an episode of My Family Feast – an Australian TV series hosted by British celebrity chef Sean Connolly that highlights the cultures and cuisines of immigrant Australians – shows how the family’s recipes are constructed as unfamiliar and “exotic” while the chef’s ultimate professional – and white, Western, and male – authority over (their) food is maintained. In the episode, the chef assists members of a Vietnamese-Australian family as they prepare dishes for a cultural festival. Extending Heritage’s (2012) “epistemics in action” and linking it to Tovares’ (2005, 2020/2021) “intertextuality in action,” we demonstrate how ingredient quantities are introduced and translated through speech act and action sequences (e.g., query/response, cooking action/assessment), translations between Vietnamese and English (in subtitling especially), and the chef’s voiceover metacommentary.

Keywords: discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, translation, epistemics, knowledge, subtitles, celebrity chef, intertextuality, multimodality
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Epistemics in action as translation
  • 3.Affordances and translation in televised/video discourse
  • 4.“The Vietnamese” on My Family Feast
  • 5.Knowledge management and/as translation
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Note
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 19 September 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.337.12gor
References (42)
Angermeyer, Philipp Sebastian
2015 Speak English or What?: Codeswitching and Interpreter Use in New York City Courts. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bakhtin, M. M.
1981 The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Bateson, Gregory
1972 Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York: Ballantine.Google Scholar
Becker, A. L.
1995 Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bednarek, Monika
2013 “ ‘There’s No Harm, Is There, in Letting Your Emotions Out’: A Multimodal Perspective on Language, Emotion and Identity in MasterChef Australia.” In Real Talk: Reality Television and Discourse Analysis in Action, ed. by Nuria Lorenzo-Dus, and Pilar Blitvich, 88–114. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Brunelle, Marc
2014 Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt). In The Handbook of Austroasiatic Languages, ed. by Paul Sidwell, and Jenny Mathias, 907–953. Leiden and Boston: Brill.Google Scholar
Collins, Kathleen
2009 Watching What We Eat: The Evolution of Television Cooking Shows. New York: Continuum. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Davidson, Brad
2000 “The Interpreter as Institutional Gatekeeper: The Social-linguistic Role of Interpreters in Spanish-English Medical Discourse.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 4 (3): 379–405. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Elewa, Abdelhamid
2019 “A Critical Discourse Analysis of Ideological Translations of Arabic Quotations in English Language Newspapers.” Language and Intercultural Communication 19 (5): 393–406. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Eriksson, Göran
2016 “The ‘Ordinary-ization’ of Televised Cooking Expertise: A Historical Study of Cooking Instruction Programmes on Swedish television.” Discourse, Context & Media 13: 29–39. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Goffman, Erving
1981 “Footing.” In Forms of Talk, 124–159. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.Google Scholar
Gordon, Cynthia
2015 “ ‘We Were Introduced to Foods I Never Even Heard of’: Parents as Consumers on Reality TV.” In The Motherhood Business: Consumption, Communication and Privilege, ed. by Anne Teresa Demo, Jennifer L. Borda, and Charlotte H. Kroløkke, 95–120. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press.Google Scholar
Guillot, Marie-Noëlle
2016 “Communicative Rituals and Audiovisual Translation – Representations of Otherness in Film Subtitles.” Meta 61 (3): 606–628. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gumperz, John J.
1982 Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2015 “Interactional Sociolinguistics: A Personal Perspective.” In The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, 2nd ed., ed. by Deborah Tannen, Heidi E. Hamilton, and Deborah Schiffrin, 309–323. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Google Scholar
Heritage, John
2012 “Epistemics in Action: Action Formation and Territories of Knowledge.” Research on Language and Social Interaction 45: 1–29. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Iedema, Rick
2003 “Multimodality, Resemiotization: Extending the Analysis of Discourse as Multisemiotic Practice. Visual Communication 2 (1): 29–57. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jakobson, Roman
1959 “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” In On Translation, ed. by Reuben Arthur Brower, 232–239. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Jaworski, Adam, Virpi Ylänne-McEwen, Crispin Thurlow, and Sarah Lawson
2003 “Social Roles and Negotiation of Status in Host-Tourist Interaction: A View from British Television Holiday Programmes. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (2): 135–163. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kelly, Casey Ryan
2017 Food Television and Otherness in the Age of Globalization. Lanham: Lexington Books.Google Scholar
Kress, Gunther
2010 Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communication. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia
1980 “Word, Dialogue and Novel.” In Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. by Leon S. Roudiez. Translated by Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez, 64–91. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Leer, Jonatan
2019 “Monocultural and Multicultural Gastronationalism: National Narratives in European Food Shows.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 22 (5–6): 817–834. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Leer, Jonatan, and Katrine Meldgaar Kjær
2015 “Strange Culinary Encounters: Stranger Fetishism in Jamie’s Italian Escape and Gordon’s Great Escape.” Food, Culture & Society 18 (2): 309–327. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Locher, Miriam A.
2020 “Moments of Relational Work in English Fan Translations of Korean TV Drama.” Journal of Pragmatics 170: 139–155. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Locher, Miriam A., and Andreas H. Jucker
2021 The Pragmatics of Fiction: Literature, Stage and Screen Discourse. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Long, Lucy M.
1998 “Culinary Tourism: A Folklorist Perspective on Eating and Otherness.” Southern Folklore 55 (3): 181–204.Google Scholar
MacKenzie, Jordan Andrew
2023 “Spice Talk: An Orientalist Register in Nigella Lawson’s Cooking Shows.” Journal of Sociolinguistics 27 (3): 245–267. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Matwick, Kelsi and Keri Matwick
2019 Food Discourse of Celebrity Chefs of Food Network. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Messerli, Thomas C.
2019 “Subtitles and Cinematic Meaning-making: Interlingual Subtitles as Textual Agents.” Multilingua 38 (5): 529–546. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ortega y Gasset, José
1959 “The Difficulty of Reading”. Translated by Clarence E. Parmenter. Diogenes 7 (28): 1–17. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pacialeo, Giovanni
director My Family Feast. Season 1, episode 5, “The Vietnamese.” Presented by Sean Connolly; created by Giovanni Pacialeo and Paul Sullivan; executive producer, Margaret Murphy; producers, Rachel Okine and Paul Sullivan. Aired September 24, 2009. My Family Feast Pty Ltd, Special Broadcasting Service Corporation 2009 [URL]
Price, Emma
2010 “Reinforcing the Myth: Constructing Australian Identity in ‘Reality TV’.” Continuum 24 (3): 451–459. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Raymond, Chase Wesley
2017 “Indexing a Contrast: The do-Construction in English Conversation.” Journal of Pragmatics 118: 22–37. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sidnell, Jack
2015 “Epistemics.” In The International Encyclopedia of Language and Social Interaction, ed. by Karen Tracy (Cornelia Illie and Todd Sandel, associate eds.). Wiley-Blackwell. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tannen, Deborah, and Cynthia Wallat
1993 “Interactive Frames and Knowledge Schemas in Interaction: Examples from a Medical Examination/Interview.” In Framing in Discourse, ed. by Deborah Tannen, 57–76. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Tannen, Deborah, Shari Kendall, and Cynthia Gordon
(eds) 2007 Family Talk: Discourse and Identity in Four American Families. New York: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tannen, Deborah
1993 “What’s in a Frame? Surface Evidence for Underlying Expectations.” In Framing in Discourse, ed. by Deborah Tannen, 14–56. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
1994 “The Relativity of Linguistic Strategies: Rethinking Power and Solidarity in Gender and Dominance.” In Gender and Discourse, 19–52. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
2007 Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tovares, Alla V.
2020/2021 “Intertextuality in Action: The Role of Expert Advice in Everyday Parenting.” Research Trends in Modern Linguistics and Literature 3: 68–89. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tovares, Alla
2005 “Intertextuality in Family Interaction: Repetition of Public Texts in Private Settings.” PhD diss., Georgetown University, Washington, DC.