Paper Title
FOOD SERVICE SIGNAGES IN A RUSSIAN METROPOLITAN INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS CENTER: LANGUAGE AND MANAGEMENT ISSUES
Abstract
The report will focus on the multilingual landscape of food services signages within a Moscow-based international business center. From the angle of the language use, its perceptions by diverse audiences and recommendations that seem to be relevant for the food service management in metropolitan trade center contexts.
The research topic has been selected due to its sociocultural relevance: food is viewed as part of national cultural codes and international universals.
The research subject covers multilingual names of food service companies (cafes, restaurants).
The research object is the attitude to the respective names’ variants from the part of various categories of the population, namely visitors to the metropolitan international business center.
The research hypothesis states that the human attitude to the multilingual food signages is no homogeneous and depends on the features related to the addressees’ social and professional background.
The research methodology stands on the mix-method approach, starts with the theoretical analysis of some relevant academic sources, moves to the empirical categorization of food signages, and further proceeds to the interviews of various categories of the respondents. The final stage includes a statistical processing of the respondents’ data and their replies.
The research findings have made it possible to identify major trends in language use types of food service signages, to specify different groups of the respondents’ population regarding their attitudes towards language use in the food service sign boards and outline promising communicative practices in the field.
The results can be used within the advertising projects related to food service regarding the best practices of the language use variation. The results are also of current interest for advertising specialists-to-be education regarding the potential and boundaries of multilingual landscape in relation to its communicative, pragmatic, ideological values.
Keywords - Language Landscape, Multilingualism, Food Signages, Cultural Code,