Abstract
Heritage foods crossing cultural and commercial boundaries carry more than ingredient and product information; their labels also mediate culturally situated meanings of taste, use, memory, and identity. This study investigates how English-facing labels for three Chinese heritage foods—liangcha (凉茶, herbal cooling tea), furu (腐乳, fermented tofu), and qingtuan (青团, a green glutinous-rice food associated with the Qingming season)—balance cultural specificity with communicative accessibility, and how prospective consumers interpret the resulting verbal-visual configurations. A corpus of 36 packaging samples representing 24 brands or source entities was analyzed multimodally and triangulated with semi-structured interviews involving 15 English-speaking adults in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Singapore. Transcreation is defined not as any nonliteral translation, but as high-intervention, audience-oriented reconfiguration across verbal, visual, sensory, and usage-related resources. Three recurrent configurations emerged: semantic preservation, cultural recontextualization, and symbolic substitution. Semantic preservation sustained source-culture visibility but often left unfamiliar participants uncertain about product type, sensory qualities, and use. Cultural recontextualization retained culturally specific terms while adding concise explanations, sensory descriptors, serving cues, or heritage framing; participant accounts recurrently linked this configuration with comprehensibility and trust. Symbolic substitution was described by some participants as immediately readable and aesthetically approachable, although other accounts indicated weaker cultural anchoring. Perceived authenticity was not inherent in Chinese names or motifs; rather, participants negotiated it through the interplay of explanation, visual design, prior familiarity, and imagined consumption. By grounding claims about label effectiveness in audience interpretation rather than design intention alone, the study develops a reception-oriented account of transcreation. The findings suggest that cultural specificity and accessibility need not be opposing goals when source-culture markers are supported by concrete, context-sensitive guidance. These conclusions remain exploratory and are limited to the three product categories and qualitative sample examined.