Funny Chinese Menu Translations

These Engrish translations of Chinese menus are freakin' funny! They're translated by people in China who don't speak any English at all. They just translated the words literally word for word without any context of what they're writing about at all. The results are a riot! Try translating some of your own websites into Alta Vista's Babel Fish at:

http://babelfish.altavista.com/translate.dyn


and you'll understand how these things can happen. I had the Babel Fish translator on my blog for awhile and I took it off because of its retarded translations of my blog from English to Korean.

Also check out:

http://engrish.com/


and

http://community.livejournal.com/engrish/164141.html


They're even funnier!!

You've got to read an anonymous professor's explanation of why they translated the menu that way:

Take #1313, "Benumbed hot vegetables fries fuck silk." It should read "Hot and spicy garlic greens stir-fried with shredded dried tofu." However, the mangled version above is not as mangled as it seems: it's a literal word-by-word translation, with some cases where the translator chose the wrong one of two meanings of a word:

First two characters: "ma la" meaning hot and spicy, but literally "numbingly spicy" -- it means a kind of Sichuan spice that mixes chilies with Sichuan peppercorn or prickly ash. The latter tends to numb the mouth. "Benumbed hot" is a decent, if ungrammatical, literal translation.

Next two: "jiu cai," the top greens of a fragrant-flowering garlic. There's no good English translation, so "vegetables" is just fine.

Next one: "chao," meaning stir-fried, quite reasonably rendered as "fries" (should be "fried," but that's a distinction English makes and Chinese doesn't).

Finally: "gan si" meaning shredded dried tofu, but literally translated as "dry silk." The problem here is that the word "gan" means both "to dry" and "to do," and the latter meaning has come to mean "to fuck." Unfortunately, the recent proliferation of Colloquial English dictionaries in China means people choose the vulgar translation way too often, on the grounds that it's colloquial. Last summer I was in a spiffy modern supermarket in Taiyuan whose dried-foods aisle was helpfully labeled "Assorted Fuck." The word "si" meaning "silk floss" is used in cooking to refer to anything that's been julienned -- very thin pommes frites are sold as "potato silk," for instance. The fact that it's tofu is just understood (sheets of dried tofu shredded into julienne) -- if it were dried anything else it would say so.

You might find these dishes at My Dung restaurant in Monterey Park. I wrote about it in my blog previously:

http://davidmkim.blogspot.com/2005/05/i-took-this-on-52505-on-my-bike-trip.html

Copy and paste the links of the ones where I couldn't insert the links. I don't know why I couldn't insert a link for a couple of the links. I blame stupid Blogger.