Toward a grand unified theory of hilarious and odd foreign-language menus.
When I first came to Paris, I was confronted with a strange problem: I couldn't understand restaurants' English menus, even when I knew the French dishes. From "chicken in her juice" to "chicken wok way" and "baba with old rum," menu translations ran the gamut from slightly-dirty to just plain surreal.
It wasn't until I became a culinary translator myself that I realized just how hard this job is. I had assumed that laughable menu translations were the result of restaurant managers and chefs (with limited language skills) making mistakes. But even for fluent experts, food and menus are uniquely challenging to translate. (The results can be hilarious: We asked Atlas Obscura readers to tell us some of the , and you can admire them in this article's images.)
Some odd menus, of course, are the result of mistranslations by folks unfamiliar with culinary terms. In Korea, notes Adeel Ahmad, a Canadian who resides in Seoul, ingredients uncommon to Westerners are often translated awkwardly or literally from a biology textbook—instead of seaweed, menus offer laver.
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Startling mistakes are especially common when translating between alphabet-based languages (such as English and French) and ideograph languages (such as Chinese). James D. McCawley explores this in his book The Eater's Guide to Chinese Characters: from the odd but understandable "ink fish" in place of squid to "stir-fried two winters," which refers to two winter vegetables, mushrooms and bamboo shoots.
This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that many people translating menus may not be translators at all. "With so many restaurants doing menus that change on a nightly basis," explains Nicole Felipe, an American translator based in France, "they can't exactly get a professional translator every time a new dish comes out of the kitchen." Simple typos have given the world many restaurant signs that say "Human Taste" instead of "Hunan Taste."
But even someone with a firm grasp of both languages can find themselves stumped when confronted with certain menu items. This is especially true, notes Marrakech-based food and travel writer Amanda Ponzio-Mouttaki, because some food words just "don't exist in English, or the words that are closest don't really adequately explain what something is."
She points to Moroccan mechoui, which, she says, "means slow-roasted sheep, but it's not roasted in the way that it would be anywhere else." The same issue arises with the international varieties of fermented dairy: Should it be "strained yogurt cheese" or labneh? Should quark be called a "German fresh cheese"? A similar question was posed in France when kale was reintroduced by Kristen Beddard of the Kale Project in 2012—should servers and menus call it chou plume, a pretty name that means "feathered cabbage," chou frisé non pommé, a technically correct if lengthy term meaning "curly, non-knobbed cabbage," or chou kale—an Anglicism that ended up becoming the norm?
A related problem is that food names or terms often have positive associations in one culture, but nowhere else. Cubans love ropa vieja (a shredded beef dish whose name literally translates to "old clothes"), Mexicans enjoy tacos sudados (literally "sweaty tacos"), and Moroccans are all about roasted sheep head. In Croatia, bitter flavors are valued, while in many countries, calling a dish or drink bitter is an insult.
