Abstract

This work examines food and foodways as social, cultural, and communicative practices and as sites of cultural mediation and identity negotiation. It explores the challenges of rendering culture-bound and region-specific ingredients, culinary practices, and eating habits across languages and cultures, focusing on Netflix’s multilingual food documentary series Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat (2018) as a case study. Through a text-focused, functionalist qualitative analysis, the study investigates how the original English version and its Italian adaptation mediate languages in contact, identities, and culture-specific culinary references. The methodology integrates functionalist and SFL-informed approaches, primarily drawn from Nord (2005, 2018) and House (2015, 2018), adapted to AVT, with an empirically derived framework of “food localization” strategies and an AVT-oriented reinterpretation of Malone’s (1988) translation strategies, complemented by an original, product-oriented strategy. This integrated approach provides a comprehensive account of food-related mediation in AVT, with particular attention to communicative purpose, situational context, linguistic choices, and cultural embeddedness. The findings shed light on the complexities of conveying food-related language and practices across cultures, contributing to broader debates on food translation, localization, and cultural mediation in multilingual audiovisual texts.