Ecologic Translation and Culinary Identity: Semiosis of the Language of Food in Lawson's English Recipes

Abstract

The issues concerning “translation ecology” (Cronin 2017) and the ethics of cultural interpretation (Venuti 2008; Inghilleri 2020) raise crucial questions about how translators should interpret and transmit culturally embedded meaning. This study approaches culinary discourse as a humanly shaped linguistic ecosystem (Wehi et al. 2009), where semantic meaning and pragmatic inferencing interact to construct cultural identity. Using a corpus of 12 cookbooks by Nigella Lawson (≈1.1 million tokens), the analysis applies register segmentation, MTLD lexical-diversity measurement, and ecosystem coding to examine how British culinary identity is textually enacted (Tognini-Bonelli 2001; Biber and Conrad 2019; McCarthy and Jarvis 2010). The results show that the narrative register constitutes the lexical and ecological core of Lawson’s discourse, while ingredients and instructions are more formulaic. Six recurrent semiotic ecosystems, including food memory, domestic ritual, and sensory intensification, emerge as key sites where cultural alterity and ecological meaning are concentrated. These findings demonstrate that recipes function as semiotic habitats that transmit memory, identity, and experiential knowledge, with clear implications for ecologically responsible translation.