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Chinese menu translation
With the 2008 Beijing Olympic coming soon, China is faced with a serious problem - how to express their culture clearly through accurate Chinese translation. Dish translation is one of the utmost important aspects pertaining to conveying Chinese culture. Chinese dishes are delicious for many people; however, the menu translation is a very challenging job. People from a Western country came to China and saw some very funny names for Chinese dishes.. One man was so amused by the literal translation he wanted to make a post on the internet about the "funny names".
These translations are first posted at www.chinahistoryforum.com by a foreigner who traveled throughout China. Let's see how “General Zhaoyun” interprets these unusually named dishes…. 1. "Chicken without sexual life" - Tong Zi Ji 童子鸡 (do you mean virgin chicken?) (Proper English translation should be "Spring
Chicken" or "Poussin"/"Coquelet"
in French). They refer to young chickens which have been
bred for eating (for less than 3 months). As Raymond Zhou wrote in the China daily newspaper, 'The process of standardizing a menu translation is a double-edged sword because it removes the ambiguity and unintended humor taking away the fun and the rich connotation'. How do we make foreigners, who grew and live in a different culture, fully understand Chinese food names? How do we maintain the original cultural connotation during the translation? Li Yang, the voice director (Do you mean, Public Director?) of the Beijing Foreign Affair Office said, "Food name translation not only puzzles the foreign tourists, but also puzzles experts who engage in dish translation". He said, "How to translate food names is even a hard job for many linguistic experts". To solve this problem the Beijing Government invited many professionals from the USA, UK, Singapore and Hong Kong. They are also seeking more proposals globally. Beijing is trying to give it’s cuisine a linguistic makeover to cater to the much anticipated foreigners visiting during the Beijing 2008 Olympic game. This article is originally published at http://www.sytra.cn/
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