Planet Earth – Those of you who’ve read along know I have a pet peeve when it comes to menu translations. If you’re going to go to the effort to translate your menu into another language, have someone who speaks both do the translation. I didn’t personally encounter either of these, though after fits of laughing, I pass along links to two sites that were forwarded to me today – strange how these things come in at the same time…
and
The problem, I think, is one of either the traditional way of doing this – someone sits down with a dictionary and picks out a definition that they like from the list of possibilities, without having a clue – so many words can be translated as so many things. Or, in this day and age of the internet, someone uses an online service like Babelfish and hopes for the best – in that case, a computer picks the translation it likes best. As a mini-experiment, I took my last menu from one of my dinners and ran it through various online dictionaries from the Spanish to the English, until I came up with some fun and creative translations – it really wasn’t much work to mistranslate my menu! Admittedly, “llajwa” is a quechua term, not Spanish, but even it has it’s own variant translation used in political circles.
Here was the original printed menu text:
Pechugas en Adobo de Citricos, Remolachas al horno, Puré de Papas y Cebollas
Tarta de Manzana
What it should translate as:
Chicken breasts in a citrus marinade, Roasted beets, Puréed potatoes and onions
Apple tart
And the internet dictionary and online sources version:
I marinate in citric audacity, sugar beets from the kiln, thick soup from the hole and bulbs
Cake in a city block
I think I’m ready to go out and translate some menus now. Then I may just go marinate in my citric audacity.
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Great post. Always gives me a good laugh to see these sorts of translations. I’ve even seen a few 4 star hotels screw it up on their brochures.
I think the dictionary translations (haven’t seen a bad one for bola de lomo yet) are the worst but phonetic translations are good too. I can just picture two people sitting somewhere discussing the translations. “What is this?” “Chep’s salad”……scribbles down Chep’s salad. (I worked in an asian restaurant once, all the chefs were cheps)
About a month ago I walked by a restaurant that had a huge sign on top that attempted to cater to tourists. Spanish and English.
Milanesas – Breded Meat
Hamburguesa – Hamburguer
Hamburguer could have passed(Portuguese?) but seeing that everything else was clearly supposed to target English-speaking people… It was one of those large plastic embossed signs so I’m sure it wasn’t that cheap to create. I wondered just when and if they realized what mistakes they made.