Multilingual views of food service signage

Abstract

The paper considers the multilingual views of food services signage. The food ser-vice sign boards are selected as the research topic due to their sociocultural relevance: food is viewed as part of national cultural codes and international universals. The paper aims to determine the variants of multilingual names of food service companies (cafes, restaurants) and the attitude to the respective names' variants from the part of various categories of the population. The method-ology uses a mixed-method approach, combining theoretical analysis of the academic sources, empirical categorization of food signages, interviews of various catego-ries of respondents, and statistical processing of the respondents' data and their replies. The research results have made it possible to identify major trends in the language repertoire of food service signages, identify different groups of the re-spondents' population regarding their attitudes towards the linguistics repertoire of food service sign boards, and outline promising communicative practices in the field. The results can be used for linguists' training in the field of sociolinguis-tics for advertising specialists-to-be education regarding the potential and bound-aries of the multilingual landscape concerning its communicative, pragmatic, and ideological values. Moreover, the collected data can be used as a didactic back-ground for translators' training focusing on the translanguaging phenomenon.