RECONSTRUCTING PERSUASIVE MEANING IN INDONESIAN–FRENCH CULINARY TOURISM TRANSLATION: AN APPRAISAL FRAMING PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

Culinary tourism texts persuade not by listing facts but by teaching readers to admire: a dish, a place, a memory becomes worth wanting through evaluative language that systemic functional linguistics terms appraisal. When such texts cross into another language, this persuasive charge does not automatically survive; it has to be rebuilt. Framing theory explains why certain aspects of an experience are foregrounded, but says comparatively little about how that foregrounding is reassembled once translation intervenes, and this gap is what the present paper addresses. Drawing on 190 appraisal-laden units from three French-translated issues of BUMBU Magazine, an Indonesian culinary tourism publication produced with Visit Indonesia Tourism Officer France, the study combines appraisal theory with Entman framing model through a four-stage qualitative content analysis covering domain, taxonomic, componential, and cultural-theme levels. Appreciation accounts for 88.2 percent of all attitude realizations, reinforced chiefly by inherently evaluative lexis rather than explicit intensifiers, indicating that the magazine culinary image rests on aesthetic and cultural valuation more than personal emotion or moral judgement. Two translation patterns carry this image successfully into French: literal rendering of appraisal that is culturally universal, and functional transformation through modulation and paraphrase that reshapes culturally specific appreciation into forms resonant with French tourism rhetoric, at times intensifying the source persuasive force. The paper argues that translating culinary tourism discourse succeeds through fidelity to its persuasive function, repositioning the translator as an active reconstructor of cultural meaning rather than a passive conduit.