The world's worst Chinese menu translation has been discovered. A few parts of it are a unintentionally "off color" (so don't say I didn't warn you), but it's hilarious: Rahoi.com.
Apparently someone with a very weak grasp of the English language -- and probably armed with little more than a Chinese-English translating dictionary -- attempted to translate a Chinese menu into English for the benefit of customers.
Yum! I'm having trouble deciding between the "Big bowl fresh immerse miscellaneous germ" and the "Big bowl flavor vegetables pigs livings bowel."
It gets better. Read the whole thing.
The Kaos Theory says, This has to be one of the funniest things I've read in quite awhile. Reminds me of when my dad would tell us Persian jokes but the punchline wasn't funny unless you were Persian. One of the commentators thought it was a photoshop job but was quicky proven wrong by someone who actually know Chinese, what a tool.
You'll enjoy it.
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Tags: chinese menu english funny translate translation
haha, the translation is funny,right? As a Chinese student,i can't help laughing at those automatic translations either.
However, i am doing a research on how to put Chinese menu into English correctly.
I think you might interest in Chinese food. Well... Would you recommend some website to me? I greatly appreciate your help. ^_^
Posted by: Nicole | March 12, 2006 at 06:36 AM
I think you need to find someone who speaks and writes both languages well and ask them to look at your menu and fix it. Also show the menu to two or three people who have spoken English all their life and ask whether there is anything in the menu that seems very strange or funny.
Posted by: Gina Cobb | March 12, 2006 at 11:04 AM
Having lived and traveled extensively in Asia, I have happened into uthentic Asian restaurants that cater to western traavelers. I have read menus that make this one. As I can reaD Chinese, I can affirm that at least the Chinese characters are really food items. As the Englihs seems to have some of the right words in it it may be the result of a very bad translation, like the propietors of the restaurant trusted their star student who was studying Englihs to translate a menu. Hey it happens.
I respect Asian culture and to a very real extent I think that if someone like me explained the errors to themm and at least attempted to explain the humor
they would be no more offended than I was when it was pointed out to me that something I had said in Chinese was awkward and made it sound very funny, resulting in a laugh.
E
Posted by: Elgon | March 14, 2006 at 07:40 PM
Yep, those are all, or nearly all, literal, word-for-word translations. Unfortunately for the translator, two individual words added together have a very different meaning in English than their individual parts. Cow boy can mean calf. Even Babelfish might do a better job!
Posted by: Jack Yan | June 24, 2006 at 07:55 PM
wel... this was just funny. I am a chinese person currently residing in Canada, and not meaning to brag, but my chinese grammar AND my english grammar is very good. This looks like a result of a person copying and pasting all the chinese into an online instant translator and writing in the result without an English Proofreader. I managed to find a site with the WHOLE menu, and the URL is listed below.
http://www.rahoi.com/2006/03/may-i-take-your-order.php
It was so funny, that i couldn't read all of it without smacking my table so hard that i cracked the tempered glass. I had to stop after the first few "sections" and come back to it later, after i've had a calm down by reading boring history books.
I actually have been to this restruant, it's in a small part of China. The owner had several Chinese-English dictionaries on a shelf that looked, and WERE out of date.
The "Siderst" actually means french toast, because the first word of the phrase means "west" and describes the fried bread in the west when it first came to China.
Posted by: Chinese-Shadow | December 13, 2006 at 12:36 AM
I have others like these:
"Chowder Fish" as "The weeks beats the fish soup" or
"Elder brother the ground is second" stands for Columbia,
Singaporean Fried rice as "The star states fried the rice" and
Mushroom Cream as "White Germs hate the..."
Marlboro cigarettes as "Million treasure road"
"Sauce explodes the cowboy bone"
such and such....
Posted by: Izak | February 23, 2007 at 06:35 AM