Chapter 11. From the sensing body to language, and back

Abstract

Tasting sessions are an exemplary setting to investigate how participants choose descriptors for expressing sensorial judgments, based upon their own sensorial experience, as well as on existing available terminologies in different languages. On the basis of video-recorded tasting sessions of amateurs and professionals, the study shows how participants navigate between different types of descriptions – vocalizations, lexical descriptors, and clausal descriptions – in different languages, within ordinary vs specialized professional repertoires. Based on multimodal conversation analysis and ethnomethodology, the study reveals how they establish the interactional semantics of the descriptors in both a situated and a standardized/standardizing way, and they establish the (un)translatability of these descriptors. Different conceptions of translation and translatability are discussed, contributing to a pragmatic of translation sensu latu.