Why you should always have someone look at machine translations.

LOL - I just received a similar URL on Monday and thought about sharing it, but now that you did...

Check THIS ONE out (with comments if you click):

 

A site dedicated to poor translations.
http://engrish.com/

 

You Team America rosers!
You'll never stop Arec Barwin! AHAHAHAHAHA!

 

Can't forget about all the movies either in English then translated to Spanish or any other language, or any other language and then to English:

"Home Alone" - "Mi Pobre Angelito" - translates to "My Poor Little Angel" - closest translation: "Solo en Casa"

Doing a search on IMDB will let you find some other gems...

 

Reads like the GARM.

 

For the price(s) less than that of a Big Mac, who friggin' cares? Just go with your instinct!

Cheap restaurants with the menus like these are hardly for connoisseurs and they are mostly limited to areas near tourist attractions in China.

 

Pure greatness!!!

 

LOL ... better make sure the "butter" is fresh out of a tube/bottle, not "recycled."

 

OK let's get to the topic for a moment.

The first item listed on the first menu is 罗宋汤, with the English translation being "The soup of Sung."

Well it's wrong on more than one account. First, the Chinese name 罗宋 is actually a phonetic "translation" of Russian. The recipe of the soup comprises beef stew, chopped celery, cilantro, chopped onion, minced tomato + tomato sauce, cabbage, bay leaves, and a couple of other seasonings. A Chinese traditionist would tell you that many of the items in this recipe are not traditionally Chinese, such as cilantro, onion, tomato, and even cabbage. It is believed the Chinese learned from all that from the Russians (maybe a hundred or so years ago during the colonial era) and thus paid a tribute to the source with the name. However, the English translation only placed its weight on the literal meaning of one character 宋, which refers to the Song (or Sung in this case) Dynasty.

Way to "trick" our innocent Western friends into thinking the soup probably has a thousand year old history behind it.

The question is whether whoever translated this way did it intentionally or out of pure ignorance.

 

Judging by the fact that two items down is "The week beats the fish soup" and all the other bad translations that it was more ignorance than intentional.

 

Or sung-youn-guy