Blind Idiot Translation/Real Life: Difference between revisions
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* [https://web.archive.org/web/20131104015120/http://www.rahoi.com/2006/03/may-i-take-your-order What happens when a Chinese restaurant fails their translation.]
** According to [http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005195.html this blog entry], "Most of us, however, have all along suspected that this phenomenon resulted from reliance on faulty translation software. Indeed, it is easy to prove that absurd English translations are being spewed out daily in China when individuals who don't know English merely plug Chinese sentences into the software and expect it to come up with reasonable renditions." A bug in one particular translation program has caused the word "fuck" to appear on shop signs and restaurant menus, etc.
** [[Even Evil Has Standards|The government of China]] has [http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/asiapcf/06/19/olympic.dishes/index.html released an official list of food name translations] in the hope of stopping this problem for the Olympics. (It also appears that [https://web.archive.org/web/20120902042721/http://www.for68.com/new/2008/6/li8655365544181680024816-0.htm the list is online], in Chinese.)
** That didn't stop a restaurant owner from putting up a sign that called his establishment "[http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/then-well-grab-bite-404-not-found-15632 Translate Server Error]".
** Many [[Blind Idiot Translation]]s of Chinese dish names are prime examples of various difficulties in translation. For example, the dish whose name literally translates "husband and wife lung slices" has that name because (a) the words for "lung" also means "tripe," and (b) the dish was reportedly invented by a couple who were street vendors in Sichuan in the 1930s. Likewise, "pock-marked grandmother tofu" is also supposed to be named after the woman who invented it. If you don't know the stories already, those names are as nondescriptive and unhelpful as, um, "hamburger" (named after the German city of Hamburg) or "sandwich" (named after an English nobleman). But even when the names are descriptive it doesn't necessarily help: a lot dishes are named as ingredient plus cooking technique, but the techniques are often typical to China and have no straightforward translation into European languages (e.g., there's different words for regular stir-frying and the "explosive" variant that uses hotter oil and finer-cut ingredients).
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