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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
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