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Post by sadie1263 on Apr 22, 2012 0:31:11 GMT
Just thought this article was funny.....think all of us have gone to or read about a restaurant that had "a translation malfunction".......and handy reading for your next trip to Beijing By Bo Gu, NBC News BEIJING – Overseas tourists often find the menus here befuddling, for good reason. After all, what Westerner has experience with foods like these? “Cowboy leg,” “Hand-shredded ass meat,” “Red-burned lion head,” “Strange flavor noodles,” “Blow-up flatfish with no result,” or “Tofu made by woman with freckles.” As proud as the Chinese people are of their thousands of years of gastronomic culture, even a Chinese native can feel disoriented when going to another province, given all the different styles of cooking. Many of the food names, often unique to different provinces, get lost in translation, especially in booming cities starting to embrace overseas tourists. Advertise | AdChoices With few English speakers, restaurants usually translate their menus word by word directly from an English-Chinese dictionary. Or they just Google the Chinese characters. A photo that made the rounds online a few years ago got a chuckle from a lot of people: a restaurant with a large “page not found” sign above its door as its English name. But the Beijing Municipal government hopes to end such unintended jokes with its new guidebook intended for the public and restaurants alike, “Enjoy Culinary Delights: The English Translation of Chinese Menus.” The effort began in 2006 with a “Beijing speaks English” campaign. By the 2008 Summer Olympics, officials had created a draft guide with translations for major restaurants to meet the demand for arriving athletes and tourists. “After 2008, we felt like the book was in a good demand, so we kept working on it and collected more menus. Finally we translated over 2,000 Chinese dish names,” said Xiang Ping, deputy chief of the “Beijing speaks English” committee, in an interview with NBC News. The cover of the new guidebook, "Enjoy culinary delights: the English translation of Chinese menus," that hopes to make it easier for foreigners to make sense of restaurant menus in Beijing. Some of the dishes kept their original names, which people familiar with Chinese food may understand: jiaozi, baozi, mantou, tofu or wonton. Some more complicated dishes come with both Chinese pronunciations and explanations: “fotiaoqiang” (steamed abalone with shark’s fin and fish maw in broth); “youtiao” (deep-fried dough sticks); “lvdagunr” (glutinous rice rolls stuffed with red bean paste), and “aiwowo” (steamed rice cakes with sweet stuffing). Chen Lin, a 90-year-old retired English professor from Beijing Foreign Language University, was the chief consultant for the book. He told NBC News that about 20 other experts – like English teachers and professors, translators, expats who have lived in China for a long time, culinary experts and people from the media – helped develop the final version. So next time you're in Beijing and you are confronted with a menu item like "hand shredded ass meat," hopefully you can crack open the book to get some guidance. It means "hand shredded donkey meat." behindthewall.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2012/04/20/11311029-what-exactly-is-hand-shredded-a-meat-a-new-dictionary-for-chinese-restaurants-may-tell-you?lite
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Post by Deleted on Apr 22, 2012 6:24:18 GMT
I com on line in the morning for entertainment and the "page not found" anecdote really made me laugh.
But everyone knows an ass is a donkey, don't they, even if it has a second meaning?
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Post by sadie1263 on Apr 22, 2012 13:10:58 GMT
I know in Los Angeles there is a restaurant named (or at least it used to be)....the Fu King Restaurant...........just seems even the sign maker would kinda mention something!!!!
Yeah......ass......is it really that hard to find out something on this??
I want to know what Red Burned Lion Head is..........or do I?
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Post by Hunny on Apr 22, 2012 13:25:00 GMT
LOL!
I would like a Fu King poo poo platter!
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Post by Hunny on Apr 22, 2012 13:35:02 GMT
There was an old Saturday Night Live sketch, about a furniture store called "Sofa King". I couldn't find a youtube of that, but i did find this gag...
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Post by Big Lin on Apr 22, 2012 14:39:28 GMT
Well, people buy rump steak, don't they?
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Post by sadie1263 on Apr 22, 2012 17:35:59 GMT
This is an interesting menu
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Post by sadie1263 on Apr 22, 2012 17:40:02 GMT
Wood Beard Meat? I like Return a meat......do they bring it out and then you have to send it back?
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Post by trubble on Apr 23, 2012 12:04:13 GMT
Old adopted mother fillet... ;D
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Post by Hunny on Apr 23, 2012 13:19:59 GMT
This is an interesting menu
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Post by sadie1263 on Apr 23, 2012 16:00:36 GMT
Wonder if they meant it was slippery while they were cooking it......or if you are going to have trouble eating it?
I'm really kinda worried about the France Style Fried Children (a whole one)..........
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Post by lonewolf on Apr 23, 2012 18:56:27 GMT
How about the Malay dish "Nasi goreng"?
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Post by sadie1263 on Apr 24, 2012 4:22:01 GMT
found this menu reprinted on a travel site....
Appetisers included…
Imagination of Lubranese Sea
First dishes included:
Drops of it gleans with clam and rucola
Linguine to escapes him
Spaghetti to the veracious clams
Second dishes included…
Fished to the crazy water
Fish boiled to vapor
And my favourite…
Resentful of calf to the lemon
Then in the section entitled “Chef’s Contours”…
Capricious salad
Peas bridegrooms
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Post by Hunny on Apr 24, 2012 10:00:18 GMT
LOL! Yea, translation can be so imperfect! I had a forum which would get spammed by mail order bride companies. It sucks to be spammed, but the messages were so bizarre I actually found them entertaining. Here's one I saved..
An it's crime tolerates your executive. Does the upstairs knight boggle? When will a contract yawn without a bought pointer? The landscape pretends russian order bride around the unchanged pool. The hand purges underneath the quarter smoker.
Of course translation problems can be very un-funny too. I once used the phrase "stupid sh*t", as slang for "unimportant stuff". But my friends - not speaking English as their first language- looked up "stupid" and then looked up "sh*t", and took those words literally. I found I couldn't even explain it to them. Apparently, in their country they take great pride in speaking multiple languages, so when i explained that they simply "don't understand English well enough (or slang usage of it)", they took that as even more insult. , and they got very angry and we didn't speak for months from it. it was a hard lesson on the internet.
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Post by sadie1263 on Apr 30, 2012 19:03:50 GMT
I'm really concerned about the duck.
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Post by Hunny on Apr 30, 2012 20:58:39 GMT
I'm really concerned about the duck. omg! Well, that's one way to cook a duck. (No, wait , it isn't XD ) Ehm, I dont even want to meet the chef though, just sayin' I hear he really loves his work
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