Johnson | Translation

No more Wood Moustache Meat?

A new guide to translating Chinese cuisine terms into English may put an end to hilarious mis-translations

By R.L.G. | NEW YORK

AT JOHNSON we're all in favour of getting your linguistic facts right. But sometimes, getting things wrong is good fun, and for years, restaurant menus in China, translated into English, have provided hilarity for the traveller. (My own personal favorite was the "Lion's Head" I had in London's Chinatown.) The Chinese authorities, however, take English seriously—the country is on a binge of teaching and learning English as a strategic economic priority. A reputation for Anglophone incompetence is not something China's leaders want to sink in (any further). So a new, official book is being published that will give non-ridiculous translations of evocative but hard-to-translate Chinese dishes. According to the Want China Times:

Some may mourn the publication of the official guide, as it could mean an end to the unintentionally humorous renderings of the colorful names to be found on Chinese menus which have amused tourists for years — translations such as Wood Mustache Meat, Four Glad Meat Balls, Hairy Beans, Drunk Crab, Pork Flower and the somewhat unsettling Chicken Without Sex might disappear from restaurants in the near future.

It'll be interesting to see whether restaurateurs get the book and use it. I'd imagine some of these mistranslations will hang on for a while, since it seems people are resorting to quick and free internet translation software like Google Translate. If I were the Chinese authorities here, I'd put the whole book online free of charge.

And lest this be seen as picking on the Chinese, there are many stories of failed attempts to render western names into Chinese. The problem is of course that each character has both a sound and a meaning; trying too hard to get the right-sounding characters can get you a very wrong meaning. The story of Coca-Cola supposedly blundering into a logo reading "Bite the wax tadpole" is, alas, mostly untrue. But if any readers know about any real stories of sinifications gone wrong, let us know in the comments.

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