Translation fun in Asia

Cleaning my phone’s memory, I noticed a couple pictures you might find funny. When you live in South East Asia, you tend to get a little blasé when it comes to translation bloopers.

After all, there are only so many times you can laugh about ordering a side dish of “French Fried” before it stops being funny. I can grab the menu of just about any restaurant around here and find things like “Fried a Thai morning golry”, “toste” or “Hot Coffrr”, which I assume must be a really strong coffee.

But every once in a while, you have genuine slap-your-forehead moment.

For instance, if you travel to Taiwan, things can go to a whole new level. Here are some actual dishes offered by a nice small restaurant in Taipei:

Since the picture isn’t really clear (poor lighting and lousy camera phone – or lame photographer), I took the liberty of transcribing and commenting a few entries:

Ever helpful, “The salad pig sets the table“, “handed down in the family pork food“, no less. Not to be outdone, “The crispy cod sets the table“, “According to burns the chicken leg food“.

“Burns” is a funny name for a chicken leg, but well, Chinese is Chinese, right?

Actually, it occurs to me that if you have difficulties reading the menu above, this next dish might be for you: “Halogen chicken leg food“, guaranteed to light up your day!

And while we are dealing with health issues, what would you say to some “Sheet iron mixed sea food food?”

Needless to say, ordering was a lot of fun.

Alright, restaurant menus are notorious for their … “creative” approach to translation, but in Asia, it doesn’t stop there:

For instance, would you send your kids at a summer school called Dumex?

Too bad, because their Hi-Q Immunity camp looks really effective. Whoever made that piece of promo certainly was immune to all known forms of IQ, no doubt about that.

Call me conservative, but I think this is pushing the “For Dummies” concept a little too far.

Only in Asia…