It was a night like any other – people inviting us out to a steakhouse. We get there, we are seated in a private room. All was well. Niceties aside, we prepare to order. I ask my wife what I should get. She says, “Go ahead and look at the menu – it’s in English.”
“Oh Really?”
I started out chuckling, then got progressively louder each time.
Yeah, that sounds like a bargain item.
“I think I’ll have the cowboy pick, or maybe the cowboy LEG?!?! I really wish I could shit you.”
What’s in a rurality salad? Country Music and buckshot?
I was so stunned by the English blunders herein, I had to buy the menu from them. Can you imagine the scene when that happened? I’ll never forget it. They couldn’t decide whether to be flattered or confused.
The Bcabe’s connected to the… um…
Can I get Retchup on the side?
I’m not quite that hungry, thanks.
Um… Is this vegetarian, then?
I didn’t know cucumbers had feet, let alone hooves.
what’s with all the verbs? But man, you had me at sweet and sour bone.
Bartender, I’ll have the usual!
wow, they love their cowboy meat here.
hold the foliage please.
Am I the only one turned on now? Guys? Anyone?
1 article pot: hometown? what the shit?
the scorn adds that little extra kick.
Nah, I think I’ll just have a Papsi.
maybe they should eat more words plum.
I’m starting to get nauseous at this point, but I’m still laughing. It gets better.
Wow – glad to know there are three “ignedients,” but what ARE THEY?
Aren’t these kung fu moves?
Is this like supersizing or what?
Do French Crips do drive-bys as well?
Do I order this or agree with it?
Does anyone order the “Strange Flavour of inside Freasure?”
man fruit? is that a euphemism?
Double boiled frog for dessert? does that come ala commode?
mordacity: a disposition to biting. Well, I should hope so. It’s a PIZZA – does it come in suppository form?
well, then, what the hell is it?
black bowel and cowboy leg? Add candlelight and you have yourself a date.
Isn’t this a show on CBS?
I passed on this.
lol. just pure lol.
how do you numb vegetables? and what’s fuck silk? satin?
What happens if I get that to go?
and with that, I’m stuffed. Duck Bukkake always makes me feel full.
I think my favorite is ‘Strange Flavour of inside Freasure’.. I simply can’t imagine ordering that.
Awesome work on the site, we enjoy reading it.
I love it. Dont stop posting.
too funny – can’t stop laughing – keep it coming!
Must’ve been translated by the same person as these menus:
http://community.livejournal.com/engrish/164141.html
I guess one should be glad they were only serving ‘sidersts’ and not ‘west many privates’…
(Comment deleted and reposted to make the link clickable, and because I got 四 and 西 mixed up in coming up with my ‘translation’…in my defense, I was tired.)
Personally, “Cowboy Leg Beautiful Pole” is the one which cracks me up…
It must be a machine translation job.
I managed to restrain myself until you got to “Duck bukkake”.
Oh dear… I don’t know whether I should be furious, cry till no tears are left, or collapse from laughter.
Those machine translations are terrible! Particularly if you read both languages. Gah! =^P
Cowboy Leg, Beautiful Pole… if you ask me that sounds like a ‘Brokeback Mountain’ synopsis.
I have not laughed so hard in a very long time!
Well, as far as fakes go, this is one of the more amusing ones. I still a amazed at how many people still do this to make Chinese people seem continually unable to master the English language. I mean, am I the only one who is getting a little tired of this form of racism??
Well, judging by the comments here, yes I am. oh well.
Keep makin’ shit up I guess. People seem to enjoy it. Just please, try to get in a little more practice on your PhotoShop. you can see the haze (and in some cases, even a freaking SQUARE) around the letters and characters. At least make these so that non Mandarin speakers won’t know what’s happening.
Oh, this is so not made up. I’ve travelled to China for 20 years and this is TYPICAL, though I must admit it’s a classic example. If you read Chinese (as the previous commenter clearly doesn’t), you can see exactly how each of the errors was made. They’re all perfectly logical, even if the result is unintentionally hilarious.
Take #1313, “Benumbed hot vegetables fries fuck silk.” It should read “Hot and spicy garlic greens stir-fried with shredded dried tofu.” However, the mangled version above is not as mangled as it seems: it’s a literal word-by-word translation, with some cases where the translator chose the wrong one of two meanings of a word:
First two characters: “ma la” meaning hot and spicy, but literally “numbingly spicy” — it means a kind of Sichuan spice that mixes chilies with Sichuan peppercorn or prickly ash. The latter tends to numb the mouth. “Benumbed hot” is a decent, if ungrammatical, literal translation.
Next two: “jiu cai,” the top greens of a fragrant-flowering garlic. There’s no good English translation, so “vegetables” is just fine.
Next one: “chao,” meaning stir-fried, quite reasonably rendered as “fries” (should be “fried,” but that’s a distinction English makes and Chinese doesn’t).
Finally: “gan si” meaning shredded dried tofu, but literally translated as “dry silk.” The problem here is that the word “gan” means both “to dry” and “to do,” and the latter meaning has come to mean “to fuck.” Unfortunately, the recent proliferation of Colloquial English dictionaries in China means people choose the vulgar translation way too often, on the grounds that it’s colloquial. Last summer I was in a spiffy modern supermarket in Taiyuan whose dried-foods aisle was helpfully labeled “Assorted Fuck.” The word “si” meaning “silk floss” is used in cooking to refer to anything that’s been julienned — very thin pommes frites are sold as “potato silk,” for instance. The fact that it’s tofu is just understood (sheets of dried tofu shredded into julienne) — if it were dried anything else it would say so.
See?
Best wishes from an anonymous professor of China studies
I just choked on my own saliva from laughing too hard. I wonder if that’s on the menu anywhere?
This is too funny, but I wish I knew Chinese, because the Anon. Prof. is right – it’s funnier when you can see how it got mistranslated.
As for the person tired of just seeing how non-English speakers mangle English, check out Hanzi Smatter (www.hanzismatter.com) for examples of American manglings and misuses of Chinese & Japanese. (I’m not affiliated with that site in any way, just a big fan.)
The Olive Garden is the only restaurant offically reconized as the “shame of Italy”. on the commercial “pappa comes from the old country”, MY ASS, i’ve eaten 2 day old macaronni and cheese that was better!
I LOVED it!!!!!!! Hahahahaha.
Quote: “Just please, try to get in a little more practice on your PhotoShop. you can see the haze (and in some cases, even a freaking SQUARE) around the letters and characters.”
Welcome to JPEG compression artifacts. Obviously you’ve never worked much with images, but maybe next time you see something like this you won’t look like such a fool.
Also, this is the funniest Engrish I’ve seen in a long time… Carbon burns fresh particularly must? Hahaha… Thanks for posting.
Heh, and while I was posting, someone else pointed that out. Well, there you go, now you’ve got two people telling you the same thing, so maybe you’ll actually believe it.
To the anonymous commenter complaining about the ‘haze’ and ‘square’: apparently you’re unfamiliar with compression artefacting, as well as with how badly languages can be translated into English if done simply by picking words from a dictionary and hoping.
Since the latter has been explained, let me give you an incomplete summary of the former: when you take an image with a lot of contrasting colours, and manipulate either the actual size (that is, the dimensions) or the file size (that is, the compression), you sometimes get small but noticeable errors — the haze you pointed out is one of the more common expressions of those errors. (Actually you get them even in images with fewer colours, but they’re generally not as noticeable.) Try it yourself: take an image from a digital camera and save it as a JPEG with a low size/quality, then compare the two. Or take a small image and change the dimensions to something larger.
BTW, the poster afterwards who helpfully explains? Thanks! I was trying to figure out how the hell ‘dry’ could turn into ‘fuck’, and now I know! (The only kanji dictionary I had handy was Japanese, which wasn’t helpful in figuring it out.)
Reminds me of a couple of things — a Spanish cookbook I picked up years ago, with a recipe for Yorkshire Chicken, directing one to brown the chicken in a quarter cup of hot fart, and a machine translation I did a couple of years ago, of a letter in Hungarian, the closing of which was translated into “Love, Outhouse,” instead of “Love, John.”
The funniest one to me is the STAGHSSD NOODLE, because what the professor posted made a lot of sense, but I don’t understand how anything could ever be translated to STAGHSSD.
Wow, Last time I checked we lived in the US where we have free speech. So, really if you don’t like the page then you don’t have to come back. And the Asian community has the same thing for our botching the Asian languages. I, personally love this site and have many friends that like it too, including some Asian friends. I don’t see the poster as having a malicious or racists agenda here. Ah, hello, his family is Chinese.
Anyways, 2 thumbs up Jon, and gold circles to you and yours. :O)
Mmmm… duck Bukkake. Great find, and great writeup.
Having lived in Thailand before for three years and traveled India for 6 months. I can totally understand about this. However, this is by far the fucking funniest broken English menu ever!
Oh, I laughed so hard I was crying – and blogged your entries in my for-translators blog.
That has got to be the funniest menu I’ve ever seen, far transcending the “red whine” and its ilk.
I’m wondering about that mountain, though. I’ve got this teenage son, you see…
LMFAO! That’s cool. And getting a bit sexual at the end…fuck, rape…mmmm LOL
anonymous professor of China studies, would you please explain “every form rape”?
Staghssd Noodle … Briliant … It’s like a menu from “The Hitchikers Guide to the Galaxy”.
Anon professor is right—all of these are word-by-word translations without context. Someone mechanically went through every word and took the first meaning in the dictionary. Whoever wrote this menu DOES NOT KNOW ENGLISH, AT ALL. Otherwise the word “fuck” would not appear at all on the menu.
Rape (pronounced ra-pe) is a type of vegetable. “Various rape” originally meant “rape, prepared in any way you want”, i.e., fried with garlic, boiled, etc.
Interestingly enough: when they say “bowel”, they do mean bowel—well, intestine, actually. And the frog desert is actually made of a type of frog.
Spring chicken means a young chicken, by the way.
LOL! LOL! LOL!!! Whew!
My friend lived in China for 2 years and sent me many funny stories of bad English translations. One of my favorites was when he had a bug problem in his apartment. He asked a Chinese co-worker what to buy to get rid of the bugs. His co-worker told him not to worry about it and that he had just the thing to fix the problem. Later that day his co-worker returned with a bottle of bug spray labeled “The Monarch of Genocide” He really had to queston wether he wanted to spray that stuff around his home.
Burn those machine translators!!!
But those are hilarious! LOL
Funny stuff. When I lived in China, I often wondered if I could make a living correcting the horrible English on signs at cultural sites. Maybe if that didn’t work, I could translate menus, too.
PS – Don’t know if it’s just me, but that page is in serious need of word-wrap.
Truly amazing. I’ve seen some pretty poor menu translations in my day, but this certainly takes the duck bukkake… I mean, cake.
Laughed my head off!!! However, appreciated the poetry of the language… Poetry is incredibly difficult to translate into another language of different cultural background, trying to keep the assossiations of both and managing to keep some sense in the process. Appreciated the honest effort too – that is a big detailed menu… Whether the effort was successful – well, it made us all laugh, didn’t it? Come on guys, say thank you for the serendipity!…
There is some funny shit on the net these days, but I have not laughed that hard for a while. I had to stop looking at it and come back because I couldn’t breathe. It’s funny because it’s a printed menu in a restaurant. It’s funny because they don’t know any better. It’s funny because they’re probably proud of it and would be insulted if someone pointed out mistakes. It’s just pure lol. You couldn’t make that shit up.
Also, if anyone thinks this form of humour is racist, go get a brain. I’ve had my foreign language skills laughed at, and although it was insulting, I didn’t for a moment feel that it was a racial slur. Just get a brain if you think this is racist humour. lol.
first thing i read today, thanks for putting me in irreverent mode, now I’m stuck
Does anybody know what Fuck the salt( beautiful pole) duck chin is?
Funniest thing I’ve read in years, Paddy
These are great!
I assume “cowboy” is a bad translation of the Chinese for “lamb”?
the chin is the best part of the duck after all
To the author: could you delete that retarded “Woooooooo….” comment? It ruins the line breaks on the page.
Thanks,
Ben
Got off a plane in Dallas. Went to a Chinese Restaurant. The waitress barely spoke english. It is a buffet and she brings a plate, then leans forward and asks if I would like pussy. I had just come off a plane and my ears were still shot so I asked her to repeat it. She did. All I could say was “Uh, no.”
It was later that I realized she wanted to know if I wanted a Pepsi.
I can laugh at these realizing that their English is much better than my Chinese.
As someone who owned Japanese cars and motorcycles when they were first brought to the U.S., I can assure you that there were some hilarious mistranslations there.
I always assumed there was someone back in Japan who, with his one semester of English, said, yes, boss, I can write the instructions for installing that part.
I think what disturbs me the most is the fact that they’re serving “Cowboy Leg Beautiful Pole”, and not simply commenting on Heath Ledger’s package…
I’m glad I wasn’t trying to drink something when I read this. This gets a 99.5 . If I followed the rule of ordering only what I recognized, I’d have a Coke and the broiled squid. Mmmmmm.
This made me piss my pants, i was lauphing so hard
Did you notice that, in the second menu item, there is a choice between “Fresh Mixed Fruit Salad” and “Mixed Fruit Salad”? And the non-Fresh variety is more expensive? I guess rotting fruit might be a bit more of a delicacy…
People should realize that these translations were probably done by some person with an English-Chinese dictionary. Then they wrote it down, and the people at the printing press not knowing any English either, tries to read the sloppy handwriting and so they can’t get the spelling right either. So while these are extremely entertaining, you should also realize that very few restraurants in China actually have English menus, and the upper-class ones will have professional translators to make a really good menu, so these occur only once in a while.
Oh, about the three ingredient thing, You want to know that they are? You’ll have to ask, because many Chinese dishes have names like Potroast with 5 ingredients. They are commonly know items to put into that kind of dish in China, so the orginal name assumes the person already know what those ingredients are. And of course the dummy with the dictionary translates it litteraly and doesn’t consider people who will need to read the English menu probably also don’t know that those ingredients are either.