Chinese menu FTW!

[Nandrew]

http://www.rahoi.com/2006/03/may-i-take-your-order/

They're almost -- but not quite -- as bad as some of our beloved local forum-goers.

[Gammaray]

BWahahahaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. *burst*

[Bke]

This is when you hold your head in shame and go sit in a corner and cry or laugh... Lolz

[ShadowMaster]

They're almost -- but not quite -- as bad as some of our beloved local forum-goers.

Your right, they have atleast mastered capitalisation and the use of the full stop.

[dammit]

"Every Form Rape"

and thats a dish?? ha ha

[HARROW]

Brilliant!!!

I think I'll go for the cowboy leg seeing as it appears on the menu, what? Four times.

Really enjoyed reading that.

[Oeaks]

Cowboy leg?

So thats what happens to the American Tourists.

[Nandrew]

Bwahahahaha! You win 2 cookies for that.

[ShellShok]

What a LOLfest.

[Afflict]

ROFL at most of the menu... pretty sad that they screwed up "Cola (COCA COCA)"

[dangarratt]

Fantastic! Mucking up with languages is great!
My Dad was once praying in Norwegian, and was confused when no-one said Amen - until my uncle leaned over and said "Jack, I think you meant to say 'fill us with kraft (power), rather than 'fill us with kreft' (CANCER!). ooops.

Re the Chinese menu, the comment by the anon. prof was great quoted here in all its glory...:


Oh, this is so not made up. I’ve travelled to China for 20 years and this is TYPICAL, though I must admit it’s a classic example. If you read Chinese (as the previous commenter clearly doesn’t), you can see exactly how each of the errors was made. They’re all perfectly logical, even if the result is unintentionally hilarious.

Take #1313, “Benumbed hot vegetables fries **** 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 ****.” 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 ****.” 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.

See?

Best wishes from an anonymous professor of China studies :-)

[dammit]

"Assorted ****" brilliant...we could use that in our supermarkets though "Assorted ****" would work just as well on a lot of the aisles...