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Oh, Shanghai There

Tales of an Englishman living in Shanghai

Fuck this Sichuan food

Dave On March 25 2011

No China blog is complete without some pictures of awful English translations on signs, menus and posters. I’ve already taken enough in the last 6 months to fill up a few albums. However, sometimes one just jumps out at you.

On Wednesday we went to lunch at a Sichuan place we hadn’t been to before. Not unusually, I was the only westerner there besides my boss. Here’s what I was greeted with on the first page of the menu:

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We didn’t order it.

My reckoning is that the first character (酸) means “sour” (suān). “Sour” sounds a bit like “cào”, which is the Chinese word for “fuck”. Either way, there’s some pretty bad (and rather unappetising) mistranslation going on there.

Categories: Chinglish, Featured

2 comments

  1. James B says:
    April 26, 2011 at 1:55 pm

    I’d guess that the mistranslation is not a confusion of 酸, but rather a mistranslation of that method of cooking, being 干锅 Gān guō (despite it not appearing in the 汉字 description), since fuck is one of the many possible translations of 干, and 锅 is pot. 酸 is also correctly translated in the English description as sour.

    And good call, I’m not exactly a big fan of 鸡杂 myself!

  2. Dave says:
    May 4, 2011 at 11:41 pm

    Thank you James! Your guess sounds much more likely (and more knowledgeable) than mine!

    Yeah, gizzards definitely aren’t my favourite. I had chicken foot pads recently (which apparently is a local delicacy). I wouldn’t describe them as tasty. More like deep fried gristle bits.

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