Lost in Translation

by Sneha Lalwani

Once you roam the streets of Mong Kok or pass by any local “Dai Pai Dong”, you’ll see oddly put together sentences in English that make sense…. But also don’t.

The English side of the menu has weird translations. Translations like: “Stir-Fried Wikipedia, Steam Eggs with Wikipedia, Stir-Fried Wikipedia with Pimientos, etc…”

Now, we all know Wikipedia is inedible, right?

But it’s not only the restaurant menus here that have a random cluster of words stuck together to resemble something of a sentence, no. Some signs, notices and advertisements also have the same problem. 

No matter how crazy funny these translations may be, they simply could be errors. Spelling errors, grammar errors and a lack of understanding in English.

Or just Google Translate not being able to translate ‘Street Speak Cantonese’ into coherent sentences.

The problem is, with certain restaurants, they may not feel the need to hire professional translators everytime they change the menus. And ‘notice-makers’ may believe the general audience is Chinese so they will understand the sign without having to read the English translation.

You see, the reason is that even fluent translators may find the task of translation difficult, and food menus are especially challenging. Certain phrases, words and meanings get lost in translation. 

We’ve all tried to tell a joke and translated it, but it just didn’t sound as funny in the other language! This is a common occurrence in translation. Meanings often get left behind.

These mistakes are more apparent with languages as different as English and Chinese. Chinese is an ideograph language, while English is an alphabet based language. 

Which would explain why certain dishes like “毛血旺” would be translated literally into “Wool Blood Flourishing” instead of “duck blood and beef tripe soup”

and signs like “汀步路,小心滑倒!” would be translated into “Slip and fall down carefully!” instead of “Downwards slope, Caution-Slippery!”

Chinese sentence structures are vastly different from English sentence structures. So much so, that if you translate word for word, you get weird sentences. These badly translated words can be rephrased and arranged grammatically only if the context is known.

The main problems in translation are:

1. The Grammar

In Chinese there is no singular or plural form. It also doesn’t have verb conjugations to indicate tenses. It means you should figure the translation out only by getting the context.

2. Idioms and Proverbs

There are a number of indirect expressions in Chinese. We all know tradition and culture is deep rooted in Chinese, and when it comes to translating idioms, you may need to read the idiom over and over again. It may seem incomprehensible at first and difficulties may arise when describing things too.

3. Sentence Structure and Construction

In Chinese, the two types of sentences are simple and complex sentences. 

The complex sentence is made up of a big combination of simple ones. Therefore it is quite important for a translator to have good command of sentence patterns.

In this photo, the Chinese ‘proverb’ “遠睇如絲如畫近睇係猪扒” is translated as “you talk like angel walk like model but your body look like buffalo.”

But if you translate the phrase without translating the unnecessary parts, the translation would be “You look better from a distance, Ugly up close.”

Now the thing here is that in Chinese, the phrase rhymes, but in English, creativity and knowledge is needed to make the phrase rhyme.

We may think this is entertaining, but bad translations like this often hurt a country’s image. Posing a threat to a country’s multilingual status.

In some cases, the translations can get so horrible that they contain hurtful slurs or slang that may damage the city’s image more.

Public signs and English menus are a good way to ensure tourists come around, especially if they are done right. But of course, this job relies heavily on the translators. Literal translation, should not be the answer to things like this, as it may be classified as ‘Bad English’ 

To end this on a lighter note, some translations are perfectly fine! Just tragically mistyped, like the picture below.