Anyone who's ever been to the blog Bad Menu knows that problems in menu translation are common. That's because, while foot coverings can be shoes and a warm outer garment can be a coat no matter what the local language says, there are many differences in the foods we eat in different places with different languages. Local ingredients and traditional cooking methods aren't so easy to translate. And often what a dish has always been called doesn't really describe it to someone who is unfamiliar with it.
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.
“Foods are frequently so culture-specific that it’s difficult to transfer the idea effectively,” says Jim Beason, a translator based in Strasbourg. “A bit like translating political satire from one country to the other—you understand the words, but your lack of cultural context means that it’s not funny at all.”
There are other problems, such as the French tendency to name a dish after its texture, while Americans want to know what's in it. Read about the many ways menu translations can go wrong, with plenty of examples, at Atlas Obscura. After you read it, you'll be craving some of that French custard with meringue and caramel sauce.
(Image credit: Blake Olmstead/Atlas Obscura)
Comments (5)
From Bad Menu!
Absent the above, a real Caesar dressing most definitely has anchovies in it. I can understand why no one would say anything, but if you're not allergic, had the dressing this way, and liked it - well that should tell you something about anchovies. YUM!
Pity it wasn't properly attributed.
-Groucho Marx
The phrase is based on the saying "time flies like an arrow", itself used as an example of syntactic ambiguity. The saying is often attributed to Groucho Marx, but according to The Yale Book of Quotations there is no reason to believe Groucho actually said this. [1] Instead, it traces the quote to a 1982 post on the Usenet group net.jokes. However, the juxtaposition of the phrases "time flies like an arrow" and "fruit flies like a banana" appears already in the 1960s as an example of the problems in having computers understand natural language. An early appearance in print, in slightly modified form, is from 1965:
"Time flies like an arrow" may seem fairly straightforward to us, but a machine sees a number of other possibiities, for example "Time the speed of flies as quickly as you can" ("time" being interpreted as a verb rather than a noun) and "Certain flies enjoy an arrow" ("time" being interpreted as an adjective, and "like" being interpreted as a verb). The machine could be instructed to rule out these particular offbeat parsings, but how would it handle the sentence, "Fruit flies like bananas"? [2]
Is quite boring in rhyme.
Please confine all puns,
To more interesting ones.
but you can't tuna fish.
Ha-cha-cha-cha.