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:
Flickr Tag Error: Call to display photo '5557907562' failed.
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.
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!
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.