Sweaty Tacos, Mouth Bags, and Risotto with Smallpox
January 26, 2018 4:37 PM Subscribe
"From “chicken in her juice” to “chicken wok way” and “baba with old rum,” menu translations ran the gamut from slightly-dirty to just plain surreal. It wasn’t until I became a culinary translator myself that I realized just how hard this job is. ... [E]ven for fluent experts, food and menus are uniquely challenging to translate." South Korea has a task force; Bored Panda has receipts; Thrillist has more.
"I can't find it on Google but it's delicious!" = the new way of saying Chef's Surprise?
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 5:20 PM on January 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by Rosie M. Banks at 5:20 PM on January 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
I was off the beaten path in China some years ago, and one of the things on this guesthouse's English menu was "soil beans", which is a particularly unappetizing modifier for an already unappetizing food. I wound up staying an second unplanned night -- thanks to a landslide, upset dog and pretty girl -- and for supper we had the most delicious... potatoes.
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 5:20 PM on January 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
posted by Homeboy Trouble at 5:20 PM on January 26, 2018 [10 favorites]
I thought it was a really intriguing article -- I'd never thought before about how much cultural information simple food items encode, and therefore how hard it is to translate them. And also I want to eat the "I can't find it on Google but it's delicious!"
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:24 PM on January 26, 2018
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 5:24 PM on January 26, 2018
And then there were the menus which advertised one of the ingredients as “wikipedia”. (Mostly from Chinese, though there was an Arabic one as well.)
One popular software dictionary used for looking up English translations of Chinese words provided little context on the meaning, let alone potential offensiveness, of the various options, and had one group of translations (from a word to do with the process of drying) which included “fuck”. Which is why there was a wave of sweary signs in China, including a dried fruit display at a grocery shop labelled “SPREAD TO FUCK THE FRUIT”.
posted by acb at 5:29 PM on January 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
One popular software dictionary used for looking up English translations of Chinese words provided little context on the meaning, let alone potential offensiveness, of the various options, and had one group of translations (from a word to do with the process of drying) which included “fuck”. Which is why there was a wave of sweary signs in China, including a dried fruit display at a grocery shop labelled “SPREAD TO FUCK THE FRUIT”.
posted by acb at 5:29 PM on January 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
I've seen a few of these, mostly in the Middle East. My favourites were Chicken With Herpes and Stuffed Aborigines. That sort of thing is a lot more excusable than a fancy Australian hotel serving "Moroccan-style Grilled Aborigines".
posted by the duck by the oboe at 6:02 PM on January 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by the duck by the oboe at 6:02 PM on January 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
Don't order the dumpings.
posted by sexyrobot at 6:02 PM on January 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
posted by sexyrobot at 6:02 PM on January 26, 2018 [4 favorites]
I do translation work of recipes and scripts for a cooking show as part of my job, and food stuff is definitely surprisingly challenging. It extends beyond stuff like names of ingredients and dishes, and includes stuff like how inexact measurements are handled — like, how would you say, in English, what is literally “pour an amount in equivalent to making a big circle on top of the pot once or twice” but in a way that isn’t just hopelessly awkward? It is a fascinating challenge.
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:10 PM on January 26, 2018 [13 favorites]
posted by DoctorFedora at 6:10 PM on January 26, 2018 [13 favorites]
and for supper we had the most delicious... potatoes.
The Chinese word for potato (which is a New World food and Chinese is not a language that has the capability to assimilate non-Chinese words easily) is 土豆 or literally earth bean. (Snap peas are Holland beans, I have no idea why. There's a lot of bean-related names for things that may or may not actually be beans.)
A lot of the mistranslations I see on Chinese menus are understandable from the standpoint of just not being familiar with Roman letters (what even is the difference between a d and a b--my kid doesn't even have that one down yet--or an i and a j? They look the same!) or translating Chinese compound words as their individual characters.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:22 PM on January 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
The Chinese word for potato (which is a New World food and Chinese is not a language that has the capability to assimilate non-Chinese words easily) is 土豆 or literally earth bean. (Snap peas are Holland beans, I have no idea why. There's a lot of bean-related names for things that may or may not actually be beans.)
A lot of the mistranslations I see on Chinese menus are understandable from the standpoint of just not being familiar with Roman letters (what even is the difference between a d and a b--my kid doesn't even have that one down yet--or an i and a j? They look the same!) or translating Chinese compound words as their individual characters.
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:22 PM on January 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
Also "I can't find it on Google but it's delicious" is this. Which does look delicious! Whatever that plant is, though, none of my dictionaries want to translate. I went down a rabbit hole (I'm sick in bed, it's something to do) and it's Nymphoides hydrophylla. If I was translating a menu I wouldn't bother with that either lol
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:39 PM on January 26, 2018
posted by soren_lorensen at 6:39 PM on January 26, 2018
I still have a shelf full of food dictionaries from back when I did restaurant-menu translation work in Japan regularly, and it is a lot harder than it looks. Especially for European dishes where the French and German terms were translated into Japanese first.
My favorite funny/scary mistranslation that I've personally seen was for an item called "Audible Cheese" offered in a cafe in Tokyo. It turned out to be an attempt at "hors d'oeuvre cheese," which makes sense when you sound out the syllables, but it was fun imagining a more literal meaning.
posted by Umami Dearest at 6:46 PM on January 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
My favorite funny/scary mistranslation that I've personally seen was for an item called "Audible Cheese" offered in a cafe in Tokyo. It turned out to be an attempt at "hors d'oeuvre cheese," which makes sense when you sound out the syllables, but it was fun imagining a more literal meaning.
posted by Umami Dearest at 6:46 PM on January 26, 2018 [6 favorites]
Somewhere in China I saw "exploding shrimp" on a menu. I had to know! They were tasty, but did not explode.
posted by nakedmolerats at 6:50 PM on January 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by nakedmolerats at 6:50 PM on January 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
Not exactly a food translation, but it could be: my wife has a scarf she bought in Norway which the seller said was made from "old sheep". That is, wool from old sheep, and it's not that the individual sheep were old, but they were old breeds of sheep.
posted by madcaptenor at 7:13 PM on January 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by madcaptenor at 7:13 PM on January 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
Google translate does a terrible job with Finnish. I recently made "Fruit with fungicide", and "fetal carrot box"for dinner. Both were delicious and neither contained poison or fetuses.
posted by vespabelle at 7:56 PM on January 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by vespabelle at 7:56 PM on January 26, 2018 [7 favorites]
I'd swear I've posted about this here before, but my number 1 experience with dodgy menu translations was at a Korean BBQ restaurant in Beijing, with a menu that had evidently been translated from Korean to Mandarin to English, possibly with a brief detour into one of the more obscure Turkic languages. The big attention-grabber was an item titled "SUPER FINE EYEBALL MEAT". Fortunately (?), the menu was lavishly illustrated, and next to the SUPER FINE EYEBALL MEAT was a photo of a very nice piece of eye round steak.
After a few seconds, it all made sense, in a rebus-y sort of way: round/ball, steak/meat, easy mistake, right?
I ordered the beef short ribs, though.
posted by McCoy Pauley at 8:00 PM on January 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
After a few seconds, it all made sense, in a rebus-y sort of way: round/ball, steak/meat, easy mistake, right?
I ordered the beef short ribs, though.
posted by McCoy Pauley at 8:00 PM on January 26, 2018 [3 favorites]
Ooooh, those of you who translate menus, I'm so curious for your best stories/trickiest translations/etc.!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:17 PM on January 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 8:17 PM on January 26, 2018 [2 favorites]
In Korea, notes Adeel Ahmad, a Canadian who resides in Seoul, ingredients uncommon to Westerners are often translated awkwardly or literally from a biology textbook—instead of seaweed, menus offer laver.
This raises also the challenge of which English one is translating for. In the UK, I think many people would be familiar with laver as a seaweed that one eats (laverbread etc).
posted by tavegyl at 8:21 PM on January 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
This raises also the challenge of which English one is translating for. In the UK, I think many people would be familiar with laver as a seaweed that one eats (laverbread etc).
posted by tavegyl at 8:21 PM on January 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
20 years ago we used to go to these basement restaurants in Chinatown in San Francisco and they didn't even bother to translate. Nor did any of the staff speak English. You just ordered and hoped for the best. Eventually we copied down some of the characters for a translate by a friend of Chinese descent who had dodgy Mandarin and she did translate one of them as "exploding shrimp". It is a thing. I think. It's very good!
posted by fshgrl at 8:39 PM on January 26, 2018
posted by fshgrl at 8:39 PM on January 26, 2018
I always really enjoyed baba with old rum until it was my baba
posted by mwhybark at 8:41 PM on January 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by mwhybark at 8:41 PM on January 26, 2018 [5 favorites]
This is also near to my heart because we stayed at a hotel in Osaka last night and the breakfast buffet had poorly translated signs for all of the items available, including “frizzled bacons”
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:07 PM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by DoctorFedora at 9:07 PM on January 26, 2018 [1 favorite]
The Bad Menu blog frequently has English mistranslations... like "Ice Cream in the Ass", "Immortal Old Duck Soup", "Explodes the Large Intestine", and "Tasteless Coffee", mixed in with other misprints, puns, poorly thought-out concepts and signboard silliness, in any language.
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:45 PM on January 26, 2018
posted by oneswellfoop at 9:45 PM on January 26, 2018
I can't remember exactly where, but the lasagne on an Italian restaurant's menu was meat cake. At first it seemed so wrong, but now I love the association.
posted by Steakfrites at 2:09 AM on January 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by Steakfrites at 2:09 AM on January 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
So, at first I was surprised by this article, because as a language learner I have found that menus are one of the first items I’d prefer to get in the language I am learning rather than in English. I read both French and Danish ok, and even in Copenhagen (where a huge percentage of the population speaks fluent English) it was pretty quick after starting to learn that I started to prefer Danish menus.
Even for Italian or Spanish and certainly for Norwegian and Swedish, none of which I actually have any facility with (other than with a related language), Id prefer the menu in the original language. I always assumed this was due to translation being done by nonexperts, which this article does touch on a bit, but maybe it’s more for the other reasons— it’s very hard to translate beyond basic ingredients, even for languages related to each other.
So as a reader of menus, I get as much or more out of my bad ability to read the local language as I do out of the ability of one line of English to reflect the original, particularly if no words from the original language are kept.
One example I’ve seen was an attempt to translate “croissant” into English. (I don’t recall the actual verbiage used, but I didn’t recognize it as “croissant”). I wanted to explain that in fact English speakers know what a croissant is so translating it was more confusing— but then I thought about various croissant-like objects I’ve had in either the US or the UK— and yeah. How do you translate “you may think you have seen this food item before but the only thing they have in common is shape and the presence of flour”?
posted by nat at 2:10 AM on January 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
Even for Italian or Spanish and certainly for Norwegian and Swedish, none of which I actually have any facility with (other than with a related language), Id prefer the menu in the original language. I always assumed this was due to translation being done by nonexperts, which this article does touch on a bit, but maybe it’s more for the other reasons— it’s very hard to translate beyond basic ingredients, even for languages related to each other.
So as a reader of menus, I get as much or more out of my bad ability to read the local language as I do out of the ability of one line of English to reflect the original, particularly if no words from the original language are kept.
One example I’ve seen was an attempt to translate “croissant” into English. (I don’t recall the actual verbiage used, but I didn’t recognize it as “croissant”). I wanted to explain that in fact English speakers know what a croissant is so translating it was more confusing— but then I thought about various croissant-like objects I’ve had in either the US or the UK— and yeah. How do you translate “you may think you have seen this food item before but the only thing they have in common is shape and the presence of flour”?
posted by nat at 2:10 AM on January 27, 2018 [4 favorites]
I lived in rural Korea in the early 2000s. "Jack and cock"was on every bar menu though we all knew to expect Jack Daniels and Coke. The real surprise was seeing " chicken shit house" on a menu one night. I was dating a translator at the time and begged him to ask about it. The menu item turned out to be chicken gibblets.
posted by peppermind at 2:45 AM on January 27, 2018
posted by peppermind at 2:45 AM on January 27, 2018
This is a cornocopia of user names....
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:24 AM on January 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by GenjiandProust at 5:24 AM on January 27, 2018 [3 favorites]
One example I’ve seen was an attempt to translate “croissant” into English.
Aren't they sometimes called “crescent rolls” in American English?
posted by acb at 6:03 AM on January 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
Aren't they sometimes called “crescent rolls” in American English?
posted by acb at 6:03 AM on January 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
Aren't they sometimes called “crescent rolls” in American English?
These are two separate foods, confusingly. Croissants rely upon a laminated dough for their flakiness. Crescent rolls are shaped similarly, and are likely inspired by croissants, and have a similar buttery richness, but have a denser, less-flaky interior texture. They're like a croissant/dinner roll hybrid (falling a little closer to dinner rolls on that spectrum, generally).
posted by halation at 7:39 AM on January 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
These are two separate foods, confusingly. Croissants rely upon a laminated dough for their flakiness. Crescent rolls are shaped similarly, and are likely inspired by croissants, and have a similar buttery richness, but have a denser, less-flaky interior texture. They're like a croissant/dinner roll hybrid (falling a little closer to dinner rolls on that spectrum, generally).
posted by halation at 7:39 AM on January 27, 2018 [2 favorites]
I'll have the "whatever" with a side of "real chicken" and make sure they have "characteristics of mouth-watering".
Oh, and a Mountain Due.
posted by tommasz at 1:19 PM on January 27, 2018
Oh, and a Mountain Due.
posted by tommasz at 1:19 PM on January 27, 2018
My favorite funny/scary mistranslation that I've personally seen was for an item called "Audible Cheese" offered in a cafe in Tokyo. It turned out to be an attempt at "hors d'oeuvre cheese," which makes sense when you sound out the syllables, but it was fun imagining a more literal meaning.
When I was a kid growing up in Utah we called fresh cheese curds “Squeaky Cheese” because of the audible squeaks they make while you chew them. Also they are delicious.
posted by Waiting for Pierce Inverarity at 4:45 PM on January 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
When I was a kid growing up in Utah we called fresh cheese curds “Squeaky Cheese” because of the audible squeaks they make while you chew them. Also they are delicious.
posted by Waiting for Pierce Inverarity at 4:45 PM on January 27, 2018 [1 favorite]
There is a market here in San Francisco that sells "fresh old chicken" and my favorite "fresh sikly chicken."
posted by njohnson23 at 1:12 PM on January 28, 2018
posted by njohnson23 at 1:12 PM on January 28, 2018
I swear I once saw a poor transliteration for 蝦餃 (dim sum shrimp dumplings, sometimes called "har gow") that rendered it as "hair cow" - haven't been able to find it again!
posted by invokeuse at 4:49 PM on January 28, 2018
posted by invokeuse at 4:49 PM on January 28, 2018
Given that I've seen "dynamite shrimp" (breaded shrimp in a mild hot sauce), "exploding shrimp" doesn't seem all that surprising to me.
Thinking of translating things from English--literal translations of "Sloppy Joe" (Whether it's loose ground beef in tomato sauce on a hamburger bun or a stacked sandwich with two meats, swiss cheese, cabbage salad, russian dressing on rye) or "Happy Waitress" (open faced grilled cheese with tomato and bacon) would surely come out rather oddly. Never mind trying to translate "Sh*t on a Shingle" (creamed chipped beef over toast).
posted by Karmakaze at 6:42 AM on January 29, 2018
Thinking of translating things from English--literal translations of "Sloppy Joe" (Whether it's loose ground beef in tomato sauce on a hamburger bun or a stacked sandwich with two meats, swiss cheese, cabbage salad, russian dressing on rye) or "Happy Waitress" (open faced grilled cheese with tomato and bacon) would surely come out rather oddly. Never mind trying to translate "Sh*t on a Shingle" (creamed chipped beef over toast).
posted by Karmakaze at 6:42 AM on January 29, 2018
"exploding shrimp"/ "dynamite shrimp" refers to the way that it's cut - it would probably be more accurate to call the "popcorn prawns." Once the prawn is shelled (usually the last segment of the tail is left on), an incision is made along the back to de-vein it. When cooked, the prawn curls in on itself the the meat "flowers" (explodes) outward from the incision line giving it more, and rougher, surface area which is a good way of picking up sauce (especially if the prawn had been dry/wet battered).
"fresh sikly chicken." probably refers to the Silkie breed of chicken.
posted by porpoise at 4:20 PM on January 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
"fresh sikly chicken." probably refers to the Silkie breed of chicken.
posted by porpoise at 4:20 PM on January 29, 2018 [1 favorite]
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