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Back in 2016, my name ended up on the physical menu in a restaurant in Shenzhen as the english translation for the dish 美式杂扒饭 - "American-style assorted grilled

Back in 2016, my name ended up on the physical menu in a restaurant in Shenzhen as the english translation for the dish 美式杂扒饭 - "American-style assorted grilled meats." https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/728498064877490176 https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/728498064877490176 Despite living in Hong Kong and traveling frequently to Shenzhen at the time, I found out from a high school buddy from growing up in Ohio that lived in the USA and had no real connection to China besides this one business trip. It appears someone who couldn't read english at all had used baidu translate to translate the menu. It turned out baidu translate was translating "扒饭" - assorted grilled meats - to my Twitter (HN, etc) username for YEARS. https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/959749866036408320 https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/959749866036408320 Crazy world. Lesson: if you can't read the language, blindly trusting translation is always a bit of a gamble!

yongjik 4y ago
Reminds me of a Chinese menu item that was translated into Korean as "서부 아프리카 원주민의 쓰라린 추위" (bitter coldness of indigenous Western Africans). Made rounds in the Korean internet some years ago.
tempodox 4y ago
Funny, Google Translate renders “扒饭” as “grilled rice”. Never trust an automated translation if you don't know both languages.
- yakkomajuri 4y ago
  My knowledge of Chinese is slim (and getting worse!) but 饭 is indeed "rice". However, it is also used as "meal" in a lot of contexts. It's common to say 吃饭 (eat rice) as a way of saying "to have a meal". Unsure what it is supposed to mean in this context though. (note: also don't trust a random person on the internet - me - with your translations)
  - HidyBush 4y ago
    Fun fact: just as the Chinese (and I think other asian cultures) utilize "rice"(their staple grain) as a synoym for a meal so in English we use the concept of a staple grain as a synoym for a meal: meal.
    - tylerfontaine 4y ago
      I can’t believe this usage of “meal” never occurred to me. That’s an amazing bit of trivia.
    - Svip 4y ago
      As far as I can tell, "meal" (time) and "meal" (flour) have different etymological origins. There was still a difference in spelling in Middle English (mel vs mele), but that distinction was lost in Modern English.[0] [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/meal https://www.etymonline.com/word/meal
    - imperistan 4y ago
      This is something of all ages I guess. In the Bible (written thousands of years ago) they use 'eating bread' as a synonym for having a meal together.
      - carapace 4y ago
        "Companion" is literally someone you eat bread with: "co" or "com" is together ("community") and "pan" is bread.
        mejutoco 4y ago
        I will add Spanish ”compartir”, to share.
      - KptMarchewa 4y ago
        English use tea for some reason.
lifthrasiir 4y ago
Naver, a major Korean website, has its own MT service called Papago [1] which rivals Google translate for supported language pairs. One day it started to translate a URL to Amazon German to an email address of my friend, who is a member of the KDE localization team and presumably his address made into the bilingual corpus Papago used. It took him years and also a governmental intervention to realize the origin of mysterious emails and sort the whole thing out. [1] https://papago.naver.com/ https://papago.naver.com/
Tao332 4y ago
- noduerme 4y ago
  At least you can't fake French cuisine. There's no powdered substitute for actual pork assholes stuffed inside other pork assholes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andouillette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andouillette
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
noduerme 4y ago
Hey, the first time I visited Vietnam I was blind tired from traveling, sat down at an outdoor restaurant on a kindergarten sized chair, got a warm beer and looked at a menu where everything was in Vietnamese. The only thing in English was "AMERICAN BEEFSTEAK". So I ordered that (dumb, sure, but they were really amused to have an actual American there. It was a really fun scene, late night and lit up, busy joint). I'm pretty much 100% certain that what came out of the kitchen was a filet of dog. It was a piece of meat. It was a bit charred. Definitely neither pork nor beef. But red. Thin, like it was from alongside the ribs of a medium sized animal. Gamey. A bit stringy. Tough. I ate it, but I cried inside. (My ex got some nameless white fish from the Mekong and was sick for a couple days, so I was kinda lucky). So yeah, watch out for when they translate you into "American-style" something. What they usually mean is "barbarian" lol
- rntksi 4y ago
  Believe it or not ... no, you did not eat dog meat.
  - zyngaro 4y ago
    How do you know ?
  - noduerme 4y ago
    I'm curious how you know this, too. My only hope that maybe I didn't eat dog came after I'd lived there for a few months, and realized dogs are relatively special dishes. A restaurant across the street from me kept one in a cage on the side of the patio, which I'm pretty sure was eaten for a wedding. (It disappeared the same night as most of the fish in their tank). Having said that, the "american beefsteak" was definitely expensive compared to everything else on the menu, and was certainly a premium item. It's true though that regular chicken in Vietnam is as gamey as duck, because it isn't hormone-fed and water filled. So maybe this was just beef. But I never had any other beef there that tasted like it.
    - rntksi 4y ago
      I will explain the reasonings, but I hope that you don't have to read on and just believe my intuition that you really ate beef. This is better for your peace of mind I think :-) - Dog meat is served in specific places, it's not something widely available (like you noticed in your reply). The place that serves it will usually have "Dog meat" in the name of the restaurant (in Vietnamese: "Thit cho") - You mentioned sitting outside on "kindergarten-sized chair". This is what Vietnamese people call "quán vỉa hè" and not many of those places serve dog meat. - You mentioned "a filet of ..." "a piece of meat" "a bit charred" and "red". Out of those 4 bits of information, only "a bit charred" makes sense for dog meat. But dog meat is always cooked into some special dishes, and never "filet" with just "one piece". - If the menu was all in Vietnamese and only one item had English, saying "American Beefsteak" and being priced higher, then it would be a special cut of Beef aimed towards foreigners. - "Gamey" "A bit stringy" "Tough" is exactly the words describing texture of Vietnamese beef, some specialty beef places will have this type of beef cut (remember, you're in a country where for most people the best way to eat beef is to have it diced thin stir-fried, cooked well done. people don't usually eat steaks.) Keep in mind that: - This varies a lot depending on the parts of the country where you visited. Since you did not specify where you ate this, I'm assuming Urban/City outskirts area, belonging to a Southern city/province or Northern city/province and am basing my intuition on this. If this happened in a very rural area or mountainous area, then my comments on dog meat being served in special places does not apply, but the comments about the meat you described still apply. Some links to see: - Some exotic cuts of beef in Vietnam: https://vinpearl.com/vi/bo-to-tay-ninh-va-12-dia-chi-thuong-thuc-thom-ngon-la-mieng https://vinpearl.com/vi/bo-to-tay-ninh-va-12-dia-chi-thuong-... ( archive.today link: http://archive.today/Hr9DY http://archive.today/Hr9DY ) - Dog meat page on Vietnamese Wikipedia (graphic images, beware): https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%E1%BB%8Bt_ch%C3%B3 https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%E1%BB%8Bt_ch%C3%B3 (some images from S.Korea and China mixed in, Vietnamese prepare their dogs differently)
martincmartin 4y ago
Reminds me of the "Translate server error" fails: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11907 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11907

yongjik 4y ago

Reminds me of a Chinese menu item that was translated into Korean as "서부 아프리카 원주민의 쓰라린 추위" (bitter coldness of indigenous Western Africans). Made rounds in the Korean internet some years ago.

tempodox 4y ago

Funny, Google Translate renders “扒饭” as “grilled rice”. Never trust an automated translation if you don't know both languages.

yakkomajuri 4y ago
My knowledge of Chinese is slim (and getting worse!) but 饭 is indeed "rice". However, it is also used as "meal" in a lot of contexts. It's common to say 吃饭 (eat rice) as a way of saying "to have a meal". Unsure what it is supposed to mean in this context though. (note: also don't trust a random person on the internet - me - with your translations)
- HidyBush 4y ago
  Fun fact: just as the Chinese (and I think other asian cultures) utilize "rice"(their staple grain) as a synoym for a meal so in English we use the concept of a staple grain as a synoym for a meal: meal.
  - tylerfontaine 4y ago
    I can’t believe this usage of “meal” never occurred to me. That’s an amazing bit of trivia.
  - Svip 4y ago
    As far as I can tell, "meal" (time) and "meal" (flour) have different etymological origins. There was still a difference in spelling in Middle English (mel vs mele), but that distinction was lost in Modern English.[0] [0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/meal https://www.etymonline.com/word/meal
  - imperistan 4y ago
    This is something of all ages I guess. In the Bible (written thousands of years ago) they use 'eating bread' as a synonym for having a meal together.
    - carapace 4y ago
      "Companion" is literally someone you eat bread with: "co" or "com" is together ("community") and "pan" is bread.
      - mejutoco 4y ago
        I will add Spanish ”compartir”, to share.
    - KptMarchewa 4y ago
      English use tea for some reason.

lifthrasiir 4y ago

Naver, a major Korean website, has its own MT service called Papago [1] which rivals Google translate for supported language pairs. One day it started to translate a URL to Amazon German to an email address of my friend, who is a member of the KDE localization team and presumably his address made into the bilingual corpus Papago used. It took him years and also a governmental intervention to realize the origin of mysterious emails and sort the whole thing out. [1] https://papago.naver.com/ https://papago.naver.com/

Tao332 4y ago

noduerme 4y ago
At least you can't fake French cuisine. There's no powdered substitute for actual pork assholes stuffed inside other pork assholes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andouillette https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andouillette
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]

noduerme 4y ago

Hey, the first time I visited Vietnam I was blind tired from traveling, sat down at an outdoor restaurant on a kindergarten sized chair, got a warm beer and looked at a menu where everything was in Vietnamese. The only thing in English was "AMERICAN BEEFSTEAK". So I ordered that (dumb, sure, but they were really amused to have an actual American there. It was a really fun scene, late night and lit up, busy joint). I'm pretty much 100% certain that what came out of the kitchen was a filet of dog. It was a piece of meat. It was a bit charred. Definitely neither pork nor beef. But red. Thin, like it was from alongside the ribs of a medium sized animal. Gamey. A bit stringy. Tough. I ate it, but I cried inside. (My ex got some nameless white fish from the Mekong and was sick for a couple days, so I was kinda lucky). So yeah, watch out for when they translate you into "American-style" something. What they usually mean is "barbarian" lol

rntksi 4y ago
Believe it or not ... no, you did not eat dog meat.
- zyngaro 4y ago
  How do you know ?
- noduerme 4y ago
  I'm curious how you know this, too. My only hope that maybe I didn't eat dog came after I'd lived there for a few months, and realized dogs are relatively special dishes. A restaurant across the street from me kept one in a cage on the side of the patio, which I'm pretty sure was eaten for a wedding. (It disappeared the same night as most of the fish in their tank). Having said that, the "american beefsteak" was definitely expensive compared to everything else on the menu, and was certainly a premium item. It's true though that regular chicken in Vietnam is as gamey as duck, because it isn't hormone-fed and water filled. So maybe this was just beef. But I never had any other beef there that tasted like it.
  - rntksi 4y ago
    I will explain the reasonings, but I hope that you don't have to read on and just believe my intuition that you really ate beef. This is better for your peace of mind I think :-) - Dog meat is served in specific places, it's not something widely available (like you noticed in your reply). The place that serves it will usually have "Dog meat" in the name of the restaurant (in Vietnamese: "Thit cho") - You mentioned sitting outside on "kindergarten-sized chair". This is what Vietnamese people call "quán vỉa hè" and not many of those places serve dog meat. - You mentioned "a filet of ..." "a piece of meat" "a bit charred" and "red". Out of those 4 bits of information, only "a bit charred" makes sense for dog meat. But dog meat is always cooked into some special dishes, and never "filet" with just "one piece". - If the menu was all in Vietnamese and only one item had English, saying "American Beefsteak" and being priced higher, then it would be a special cut of Beef aimed towards foreigners. - "Gamey" "A bit stringy" "Tough" is exactly the words describing texture of Vietnamese beef, some specialty beef places will have this type of beef cut (remember, you're in a country where for most people the best way to eat beef is to have it diced thin stir-fried, cooked well done. people don't usually eat steaks.) Keep in mind that: - This varies a lot depending on the parts of the country where you visited. Since you did not specify where you ate this, I'm assuming Urban/City outskirts area, belonging to a Southern city/province or Northern city/province and am basing my intuition on this. If this happened in a very rural area or mountainous area, then my comments on dog meat being served in special places does not apply, but the comments about the meat you described still apply. Some links to see: - Some exotic cuts of beef in Vietnam: https://vinpearl.com/vi/bo-to-tay-ninh-va-12-dia-chi-thuong-thuc-thom-ngon-la-mieng https://vinpearl.com/vi/bo-to-tay-ninh-va-12-dia-chi-thuong-... ( archive.today link: http://archive.today/Hr9DY http://archive.today/Hr9DY ) - Dog meat page on Vietnamese Wikipedia (graphic images, beware): https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%E1%BB%8Bt_ch%C3%B3 https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%E1%BB%8Bt_ch%C3%B3 (some images from S.Korea and China mixed in, Vietnamese prepare their dogs differently)

martincmartin 4y ago

Reminds me of the "Translate server error" fails: https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11907 https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=11907