A colleague dropped a restaurant menu into our group chat and the table laughed for a good while. Four-joy meatballs had become Four Glad Meat Balls; the Sichuan beef and tripe dish known as husband and wife lung slices had become Husband and Wife's Lung Slice; red-braised lion head meatballs had become Red Burned Lion Head; and ants climbing a tree had been rendered quite literally as a pile of ants climbing a tree. This is not a collection of jokes invented for the occasion — CCTV ran a survey of exactly these menu translations back in 2007. A 2016 China Youth Net reprint of a New York Times report added the Pingyao sign offering sauce on my grandma (in fact a steamed oat noodle dish), urine-scented dried noodles on a Xian menu, and a Shenzhen sweet and sour shrimp dish rendered as Gollum Shrimp.
The funnier stories, though, come from the interpreting booth. In a report on a lecture at Nanjing University, a veteran diplomatic interpreter recalled being asked, early in her career, to translate a state banquet menu: she turned a braised duck dish into an injured duck, the foreign guest smiled when the dish arrived, and her teacher's question — why is this duck injured? — stayed with her for life. The same lecture described a dialect in which four and ten sound alike, so the interpreter would say the number while holding up fingers to confirm it, and be corrected at once if she was wrong. In another senior translator's memoir, a beginner who did not know how to render a polite dismissal simply reversed the four Chinese characters and said something like courtesy not, and was told on the spot that an interpreter must never pretend to understand and improvise. Someone else recalled leaving the notebook of prepared terms behind and having to improvise through an entire assignment.
The dates vary widely and the sources are scattered — menu surveys by CCTV and China Youth Net, overseas reports on Chinese restaurant menus reprinted by Huanqiu and China News Service, university lecture reports and translators' memoirs — but the mechanisms behind the laughter have not aged at all. Let us put the jokes aside for a moment and ask how dish names ought to be translated.
1. Why literal translation fails: a dish name is a name, not a description
Spring chicken became Chicken Without Sexual Life, mouth-watering chicken became Slobbering Chicken, the glutinous rice roll called rolling donkey became Rolling Donkey, and Mapo tofu became tofu made by a woman covered in freckles. The problem in each case is not vocabulary but treating rhetoric as a specification. Buddha jumps over the wall was flattened into a list of abalone, shark fin and fish maw — accurate as to ingredients, with the whole allusion gone. A German pork knuckle dish turned into Germany sexual harassment, a classic case of looking up each character separately. One widely circulated television menu managed CATE MEUN for carte, SORT DRINK for soft drink and Pear Milk Tea for bubble tea, losing spelling, word choice and common sense in three layers at once.
Public signage falls into the same trap. A Shanghai notice was rendered as beware wallet and carefully slide, when it meant keep an eye on your wallet and mind the wet floor; some accessible toilets in Beijing were labelled Deformed Person instead of a term for people with disabilities. A polysemous word takes its most frequent sense, an abbreviation is expanded in the wrong field, a proper name gets no domain check. Machines now produce this class of error faster and more uniformly: a person makes scattered mistakes, a machine makes them in batches.
2. Interpreting jokes almost always happen in the second when nobody dares to ask
The braised duck error came from taking a culinary term apart character by character. The idiom about a donkey turning a millstone, meaning going round in circles without progress, was something that same veteran interpreter said she failed to understand even after hearing it twice, until a colleague nearby came to the rescue. Dialect, colloquialisms and trade jargon are exactly where dictionaries help least and guessing is most dangerous. The beginner who reversed courtesy was given a plain instruction: never pretend to know. That is not a matter of saving face but of whether the listener understands anything at all.
The preparation senior interpreters keep describing is quite plain: the visiting party's background, the subject matter, proper names and figures, and the colloquialisms likely to surface, all listed in a small notebook beforehand. One person sits at the front, but a whole team has already worked through the awkward phrases behind the scenes and handed them to a senior reviser. If something is genuinely not heard clearly on the day, the professional move is to ask for a repetition or confirm the number with a gesture, rather than blur past it. Holding up four fingers to check whether the speaker said four or ten looks clumsy and is far better than guessing wrong.
3. After the laughter: dish names do have standard renderings
The Beijing Municipal Government Foreign Affairs Office and the city's foreign-language activities committee once jointly published a guide to English menu translation that fixed names for 2,158 Chinese dishes, and its principles are easy to remember. Lead with the main ingredient and add the secondary ingredient or sauce, as in Chinese Mushrooms with Pine Nuts. Lead with the cooking method and add the ingredient, as in Tossed Clear Noodles with Chili Sauce. Lead with a person or place name, as in Mapo Tofu with an English gloss, or Noodles with Soy Bean Paste, Beijing Style. Shape and texture can enter the name too, as in Crispy Chicken. Where a term is already in English dictionaries or widely accepted, keep the pinyin or established spelling: Jiaozi, Baozi, Tofu, Kung Pao Chicken, Wonton, Dim Sum. Where an allusion gives no clue to the method, use pinyin with a bracketed gloss, as in Fotiaoqiang, Guotie and Tangyuan.
The details are governed too. Countable nouns on a menu generally take the plural, while a dish consisting of one item, or something too fine to count, takes the singular. Use in when the main ingredient sits in a sauce, and with when a dip is served separately or poured on afterwards. Later official standards for English renderings in public services extended the same logic to catering, transport, culture, entertainment and other fields. In other words, translating a dish name is not a test of literary flair; it is a question with a standard answer that requires looking things up.
4. Bringing the joke back to today's files
Menu jokes and certificate jokes share one root: the receiving party does not admire your rhetoric, it checks the field line by line. Today's batch-produced product labels, detail pages and manuals differ from that handwritten menu only in speed; without a locked term list, the same error is reproduced neatly at scale. So what is worth inheriting from those veteran translators is not a clever rendering but three plain habits: check the reference before starting, ask when unsure, and verify every name before delivery. For the product text that has to be maintained for 365 days after the exhibition closes, see after six days come 365; for why names and dates on a credential file must line up first, see as credential verification tightens.