Have you noticed that nearly every time you come across a newspaper story about funny mistranslations, it’s about food and menus? These mishaps often go viral fuelled by travellers sharing hilarious snapshots. More often than not, the embarrassment is caused by flaws of automated translations when tools can overlook minor differences between characters, and you get a tractor instead of heat, for example. Or a mistyped word turns a simple request for a pomegranate into a plea for a grenade.
Typos aside, menus have always been somewhat challenging even for professional translators for a number of reasons.
Some dish names are intentionally playful or cheeky. One name I came across in a recent translation project was Breakfast Banger. Having lived in the UK for 23 years and never heard of it, I had to look it up. It turned out to be a British sausage that’s part of a traditional English breakfast. The term banger is a slang word for sausage originating during World War I or II when sausages had added water, causing them to bang or burst, when fried.
Other times chefs deliberately give mundane-sounding dishes more exotic or intriguing names to entice diners. Take chicken farcie, I hope French gourmands forgive me for calling it simply stuffed chicken, although if we wanted to keep the French flair, the Russian translation of it as фаршированный цыпленок по-французски might do the trick.
We see unique names on menus, too. As is Passion fruit semi-Freddo, a classic Italian dessert, meaning half-frozen in Italian, now featured in the Russian Wikipedia in its transliterated version: Семифреддо (из маракуйи). Or Uni café de Paris butter, named after a Swiss restaurant in Geneva, where it is believed to have originated, is also transliterated (масло «Кафе-Де-Пари»).
Then there are dishes that highlight regional ingredients: Challans Duck breast (Утиная грудка «Чалланс») refers to the breast meat of a duck from the Challans region in western France. Gloucester old spot pork loin (Свиная вырезка глостерширской пятнистой породы) is a premium cut of pork from the Gloucester Old Spot pig, a traditional breed in the UK. And how about Paris mushroom velouté with Norfolk shrimp (грибной соус «велюте» по-парижски с норфорлкской креветкой)? Here, we’re juggling two different locations in one dish, just as in Dover sole a la Grenabloise (восточнотихоокеанская малоротая камбала «а ля Гренобль»).
Asian food is always fun to translate, although to make the translator’s job easier, many of them are transliterated: udon noodles (лапша «Удон»), Dou Fu Nao Tofu Pudding (Пудинг доуфунао из тофу), Sichuan Hot Pot (Сычуаньское жаркое в горшочке). And some names helpfully include explanations in brackets: Guilinggao (Herbal Jelly) – Гуйлингао (Травяное желе).
On top of everything else, menus often reference specific farms or producers, for example, Stourton estate Venison burger (Бургер из оленины с фермы «Стоуртон»), just as wines may mention vineyards and provenance, but perhaps I should save the topic of wine translations for another day.
While numerous names from different cuisines were borrowed by languages globally a while ago, just a few examples above show that international dishes go far beyond paella, risotto or quiche. That’s why dish names that look like short phrases on a list carry so much more meaning and have various stories behind them.
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