Whadda bunch of spoil sports!

I can’t tell you how many times a perfectly normal evening out for a couple of tapas has turned into a total knee-slapping giggle fest when some well-meaning waiter provides us with a menu in English. I half suspect they do these wonky translations on purpose, but it’s great fun and always adds to our enjoyment. But apparently the Chinese think differently …

China dishes up menu translations

China is taking action on the English translations of its restaurant menus in its campaign to brush up the country’s image for next year’s Olympics.

The Beijing Tourism Bureau has released a list of 2,753 dishes and drinks it thinks could do with a wording rethink.

Translations such as “virgin chicken” for a young chicken dish and “burnt lion’s head” for pork meatballs are confusing for foreigners, it says.

This is so totally wrong!!! In fact, people would end up ordering all those weirdly named things just so they could tell people ‘back home’ that they’d tried them. And anyhow, there is something rather charming about not being overly slick and being seen as having taken a stab at writing an English menu but not giving it too much importance. Because the important thing should be the food and the ‘ambientation’ (one of my favourite Spanglish words, found on a humourously mistranslated sign).

I feel quite sorry for all those visitors who are going to miss out on this simple pleasure by receiving only government approved menus.

You can click on the Belching menu to get a better look at it.