We have all seen menus in French restaurants that have been translated poorly into English, where perfectly delicious dishes suddenly become unappealing, completely uninteresting, or exotically rude sounding in the English version offered up for tourists.
A quick search for examples found ‘savage rabbit’, ‘varied crudenesses’, ‘raped carrot’, ‘prickly tomato sauce’, and ‘jumped lamb’. Tempting, I’ll take the lot.
This issue was brought to mind this morning because I noticed that the t-shirt my daughter is wearing today reads:
‘The life is too short…to be a bad mood’
Note, I’m not laughing – there are pages on this site where an automatic translation has been posted while waiting for older daughter to find time to do a correct translation (her summer job). Hence I do appreciate the shortcomings of an automated or dictionary translation.
Since we also have to renegotiate the pay rate each school holiday before translating can begin, it’s a slow process. Eight years in France hasn’t been wasted on her, and she knows all about grèves (strikes) and manifestations (demonstrations) although she hasn’t started setting fire to our car in protest quite yet.
Of course, odd sounding translations on menus and t-shirts don’t really matter in the scheme of things, apart from the possibility of something unappealing turning up for your dinner, and can provide as much entertainment as inconvenience, but just in case you are struggling with a phrase or about to order 50 menus for your restaurant here’s my offer.
Completely free and with no obligation at all, if anyone non-native English speaking wants to check that a short phrase or two is correct, post it below and I’ll check it for you. If you post the complete works of Dostoevsky you might be in for a long wait, but if any little phrases trouble you please go right ahead.
Of course I do appreciate that the number of non-English speaking readers of this blog might be rather small, but don’t say I didn’t offer. If you happen to be sat in a Chinese T-shirt factory about to print off another batch of 1000 T-shirts with English slogans on, check here first!
Although if the owner of the Paris hotel that posted the now famous sign saying ‘Please leave your values at the front desk’ had asked for help perhaps he would never have become quite so famous…and the equally renowned clothes shop producing ‘dresses ideal for street-walking’ might just have purposely mis-translated for the publicity.
I love those quirky menu translations. Who could resist a raped carrot? Then there’s the “fried inkwells” we saw in Crete; and in the same place a “Franco-Anglais” restaurant, amongst whose menu items there were “Testicules de porc”, or in English “Pigs’ balls.” Yummy.
hahahaha I’m going to be stalking your blog for a month until I come there check out these menus for myself! Her ein Kuwait, the errors in menu are so frequently overdone that I’ve let ‘em slip by, but too often they are funny enough to make you choke on your food.
ahahahahahahaha so true!!! The same happens in touristic spots in Italy.
Also in Italy, all public spaces have to display Fire Emergency Procedures everywhere. I’ve found some very amusing English translations in a hotel, where for exemplo, instead of EMERGENCY EXIT they wrote EMERGENCY END. I should have asked to photocopied that thing…
On a hotel blaconey ” jump for your life”
When you finally get your hands on your daughter, would you ask her to check out Google’s “Word Monkey”. It’s a translator and free but it completely murdered Polish for me. Of course, Polish is impossible but I would love to know how well it does French. This was a funny post. Keep it up.
My favourite menu mis-translations to date are ‘marmited lamb’ and ‘manure salad’.