A Flumesday reader in Shanghai sent me a photo over the weekend of a menu at a Chinese restaurant at Chongqing’s Jiangbei Airport. The phenomenon of “Chinglish,” or poorly translated Mandarin to English, is prevalent all over mainland China. For example, there was a sign in my neighborhood at the base of an escalator that read, “Lovers should come together.” As Chinglish has become somewhat played out on the English blogs of China, I have tried to avoid posting funny photos of Chinglish on this site. But this menu, sent to me by Craig T., is just too fucking good. Read the menu and then I will attempt to explain.
What’s interesting is that the price to “fuck a fish head” is 10 yuan more expensive then to “fuck a spring chicken.” One would think fucking a spring chicken would cost more. So as I wondered when I first read this, why would a Chinese restaurant use the word “fuck” so much on its English menu. Craig T., an old-timer in China and the son of the woman holding the menu in the photo, explains the translatory fuck-up like this:
Based on its heading, the whole page of the menu, it seems (much to everyone’s delight) features dishes prepared using the “gan guo” method of cooking. “Gan guo,” translates to “dry pot”… probably “pan seared” or something like that in English. That word “gan,” in addition to meaning “dry” is also apparently Taiwanese (and sometimes Mainland) slang for the f-word, and for some reason the person doing the English translation chose that one as the word to translate… over and over and over again.
So in this case, the restaurant erroneously used the word “fuck” instead of “pan-seared.” So “Fuck a Bullfrog” is really something like pan-seared bullfrog. And “The Rabbit Fucks the Pot” would be pan-seared rabbit. And so on. Craig T. has since returned to the Chongqing Airport and reports that the eatery has since removed all the “fucks” from its menu. So thanks to Craig T., this is the only known evidence of the famous fuck menu of Chongqing.
•Wikipedia: Chinglish
actually, they probably used babelfish or something similar… ’cause I really can’t imagine anyone even pretending to be a translator not knowing the f-word.
though who knows, stranger things have happened…
@Little Alex
I have been living in China for several years now, and believe me, you see a lot of funny stuff on boards and signs. These translations are not done by professional translators but rather by employees who very often just grab a dictionary and translate word by word.
I once came across a delicious dish called “children legs” in a pizza restaurant; they must have run out of chicken wings…
All this talk about fucking and nobody’s going to mention “double dong belly”?
i believe they did it on purpose,just for fun you know,
as you can see,they used “f**ks” in “the robbit f**ks the pot”
i don’t think there is anybody that “very often just grab a dictionary and translate word by word” will know this.
The translator must hold a grudge against this store owner. Such hatred!
This isn’t really Chinglish. It arose from an error in the popular Chinese software “Kingsoft QuickTrans” software used as a dictionary / translator.
See here for an explanation.
http://www.danwei.org/computing/where_chinglish_comes_from.php
[...] I might add…) shared a very amusing menu filled with mistranslations that they discovered at Flumesday.com entitled “The Rabbit Fucks the Pot.” This is a photo of a menu from a Chinese [...]
[...] Because “Gan,” also means “to fuck” in Chinese (if one adds a pronoun afterwards), it inevitably makes for some hilarious English menu translations. Here’s an example: http://www.flumesday.com/2007/02/27/the-rabbit-fucks-the-pot/ [...]
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