The photographer Ian Cumming was my partner-in-crime on one of my Xinjiang food research trips. It was a hilarious couple of weeks: we were trailed by secret police and asked to leave our ‘weapons, explosives and isobactive materials’ at hotel receptions; Ian was hassled by prostitutes while I was repeatedly mistaken for a prostitute myself (given my scruffy clothes and lack of make-up, I can’t imagine how anyone would have thought I was soliciting for custom!); and I was unable to fasten my trousers for the entire trip because I had badly scalded my midriff with a kettle of boiling water the night before departure, which meant I had to go around with a loose silk cummerbund wrapped around my waist for a month to avoid disturbing the wound. Having said all that, and despite the tense political atmosphere, Xinjiang was fascinating and beautiful, and we met some wonderful people.
Anyway, Ian has just returned from a trip to Italy, where he dined in an apparently very smart restaurant with a menu whose translations rival the very worst Chinglish atrocities (see this link for my Financial Times piece on Chinese restaurant menu translations). This is an excerpt from Ian’s email, reproduced with his permission:
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
Any of you got any favourites?
I have to mention that when I was looking through one of my China notebooks this morning, I found a note about ‘one of best-ever translations!’, found on a Suzhou restaurant menu. It was
‘Boiled the soup with the ovary of toad’
I laughed a lot, because the idea of eating TOAD’s ovaries was so horrible, until I realised that the translation itself actually wasn’t too far off the mark, because it was actually a soup made with FROG ovaries (xue ha), and that while I might not myself find a frog ovary soup revolting, most normal English people probably would…
This is the best mistranslation on a Chinese menu that I’ve seen in a long time, Gong Bao chicken rendered as ‘Public explosion chicken!’ Whoever came up with this translation confused the first character with another that sounds the same, and substituted another homonym for the second character. Gong Bao chicken is originally 宫保鸡丁 – which literally means ‘Palace Protector chicken cubes’, because it’s named after a former ‘Palace Protector’, or governor-general, of Sichuan Province, Ding Baozhen. Here, they’ve confused one gong (宫 palace) for another gong (公 public), and substituted the bao that means either 1) ‘fast-fry over a high heat’ or 2) explode for the bao that means ‘protect’ (this latter mistake is a common one). It’s from a menu in southern Yunnan.
