Sweet and bitter: a contrastive study of tea tasting notes in Chinese and French

The present study aims to observe how specialized discourses reflect cultural origins and adapt to the local cultural context by examining tea tasting notes in Chinese and French. Our analysis is based on two types of tasting notes: noncommercial publications (books, magazines, websites) and commercial publications. We first performed a quantitative analysis using textometric tools. The results were then interpreted in relation to the socio-cultural context. The following phenomena are observed: Concerning the tasting process, although the aspects described by the experts are almost identical (dry leaves, liquor and infused leaves), the taste descriptions diverge significantly between the notes in Chinese and those in French. Indeed, while the former presents essentially an overall assessment, the French experts distinguish three phases of taste evolution, as in the case of wine tasting. Regarding the olfactory and taste descriptors: in French, the flavors are classified into families designated by a food / representative object, whereas in Chinese descriptors are generally composed of primitive taste morphemes. Another surprising finding: there is a strong presence of terms such as "bitterness" and "astringency" in the French corpus, conversely one of the most frequent terms of the Chinese corpus is "sweetness". As for the style, the notes in Chinese are mainly composed of quadrisyllabic expressions, a characteristic of traditional literature, whereas we note in French the presence of both the cumulative telegraphic style and descriptions containing many metaphors. Thus, these three aspects of analysis highlight a strong cultural imprint in the tasting notes, regarding both the organoleptic perception (holistic trend in China against an analytical tropism in France) and its description (influence of traditional literature for Chinese and oenological terminology for French).