FT
Unsavoury_characters
By Fuchsia Dunlop 2008-09-02As the 2008 Olympic Games approached, the Beijing government embarked on a gargantuan task: to provide approved translations of all the names of dishes English-speaking visitors were likely to encounter on restaurant menus. They were keen, the official Chinese news agency said, to avoid “bizarre English translations” such as “chicken without sexual life” (used to describe a young chicken) and “husband and wife's lung slice” (a Sichuanese street snack). The agency added, with an unusual burst of humour, that “the images they conjured up were not, one could say, appetising”.
Terrible mistakes on Chinese restaurant menus provoke the mirth of foreigners all over the world. Who could forget being offered “burnt lion's head” for dinner? A quick internet search brings up reports of such delicacies as “benumbed hot Huang fries belly silk” and “the fragrance explodes the cowboy bone”. My own personal favourite is actually from the chic pink-and-white packaging of a biscuit whose name was translated as “iron flooring cremation” (a one-by-one literal translation of the characters tie ban shao, which should have read “baked on an iron griddle”).
Yet one can understand the desire of the Chinese leadership to avoid such embarrassing errors, particularly in a year when they are determined to show their best face to the world. The authorities have already urged Beijingers to queue up nicely and avoid spitting. Tourist restaurants have been advised to stop serving dog meat during the Games, and there's even been a directive offering sartorial advice that includes not going out dressed in pyjamas. In such a clean, orderly Olympic city, what place is there for “steamed crap”?
Jokes aside, there is a practical need for decent translation of Chinese restaurant menus. It's not just that foreigners might like help in deciding what individual dishes to choose; the success of a shared Chinese meal depends upon careful ordering.
A dinner in which more than one dish is sweet-and-sour or everything is soupy is a gastronomic disaster. A good meal, by contrast, pleasures the palate with a whole variety of experiences. Even in a top-class restaurant, unless you understand a little of the nature of the dishes on offer – their colours, flavours and cooking methods, their moistness or dryness, their shapes and textures – you won't be able to devise a stimulating and harmonious menu.
Drawing up accurate translations for even a fraction of Chinese dishes would be a daunting endeavour (Sichuan province alone lays claim to 5,000 different dishes). And the language of Chinese cuisine presents particular challenges. Chinese chefs use a vast vocabulary of terms to describe their cooking methods, many of which are untranslatable. Take, for example, liu, which means to pre-cook pieces of food in oil or water and then marry them with a sauce that has been prepared separately: how to describe this succinctly in English? Even a method like stir-frying has many variations, such as basic stir-frying (chao), fast stir-frying over a high flame (bao), and stir-frying in a dry wok (gan bian). When I trained as a chef in Sichuan province, I had to learn a canon of 56 different cooking methods, and that was just the beginning of my apprenticeship in Chinese cuisine. Translating such a richness of culinary technique into menu shorthand is no easy matter.
Moreover, many types of food have no English-language equivalent. Think of “dumpling”, a blanket term used for all kinds of Chinese snacks, from jiao zi (boiled semi-circular dumplings), to shao mai (steamed dumplings shaped like money bags) and bao (steamed dumplings with twirly tops). And how to translate fen, which can mean powder, meal, noodles, or strips of starch jelly? When taking notes in Chinese kitchens, I find myself jotting in Chinese characters simply because there is no other way of recording precisely what I see, smell and taste.
Yet you can only go so far in borrowing from Chinese because, beyond a certain level, you have to know the actual Chinese characters to understand precisely what you are talking about. In Sichuanese cuisine, for example, there are two cooking methods that would both be transliterated as kao, but you can't tell them apart unless you see the actual characters. The different characters for “salty” and “umami” are both rendered in the Roman alphabet as “xian”.
There are also issues of taste and cultural judgement. The most famous Sichuanese beancurd dish is mapo doufu, which literally translates as “pockmarked old woman's beancurd.” Meant affectionately, it sounds at first rather abusive in English. Similarly, there's a chain of hotpot restaurants in Sichuan called Cripple's Hotpot (pazi huoguo), and a snack shop called Hairy Mole Dragon-Eye Nuns (zhi huzi longyan baozi) – named after their original proprietors, one of whom was disabled and the other who had at least one hairy mole on his face. And if you fancy a stir-fried chicken supper, do you really want to know that the menu also offers “animal reproductive organs in pot”?Sometimes a little linguistic obfuscation might be a good thing. Finally, how do you capture the wit and poetry in the names of many Chinese dishes? Take Dan dan mian – in Chinese, its name is a beautiful onomatopoeia that evokes the bouncing motion of baskets carried on a street vendor's shoulderpole, and the street vendor's cry. Translated as “shoulderpole noodles”, it loses its sound and rhythm; as “Dan dan noodles”, it sounds nice but lacks meaning. Even the “husband and wife lung slices” singled out by the official Chinese news agency as particularly unsavoury tells the tale of a couple of Chengdu street vendors of the 1930s whose marriage was famously harmonious, and whose spicy beef offal won the undying affection of the city's residents.
The final result of the Beijing government's endeavours is a 170-page book entitled Chinese Menu in English Version. Its suggested translations for more than 2,000 dishes represent a solid achievement, and a great leap forward for linguistically challenged Chinese restaurateurs. The two dozen translators have stuck to their guns in holding on to several useful Chinese terms, like jiaozi for boiled dumplings, tangyuan for glutinous riceballs, and shaomai for those money-bag steamed dumplings. They have avoided some notorious foodstuffs (such as dog), but no one could accuse them of sanitising their menu, because they have included challenging dishes such as steamed pig's brains and sautéed chicken gizzards.
Yet the list is a pale reflection of one of the world's most marvellous cuisines. Lyrical descriptive terms – like feicui (jadeite) for greenish foods, and guaiwei (strange-flavour, used for an intriguing combination of tastes) have been lost in the translation, and mapo doufu has severed its connection with the lovable pockmarked old dame of Chengdu. As Raymond Zhou wrote in the China Daily, this standardised translation is “a double-edged sword. It removes the ambiguity and unintended humour ... But it takes away the fun and the rich connotation too. It turns a menu into the equivalent of plain rice, which has the necessary nutrients but is devoid of flavour”.
GLOSSARY: Tree-climbing ants to spicy minced pork
Chinese ‘pinyin' Official translation Literal translation
Mapo doufu Mapo Tofu (stir-fried tofu in hot sauce) Pock-marked old woman's beancurd
Ban shuang er Tossed black and white fungus Two ears tossed together
Fuqi feipian Beef and Ox Tripe in Chili Sauce ‘Man-and-wife' lung slices
Zui ji Liquor-soaked chicken Drunken chicken
Guaiwei zhushou Braised spicy pig feet Strange-flavour pig feet
Hongshao shizitou Stewed pork ball in brown sauce Red-braised lion's heads
Yuxiang rousi Yu-Hsiang shredded pork Fish-fragrant pork slivers
Mayi shang shu Sauteed vermicelli with spicy minced pork Ants climbing a tree
Kou shui ji Steamed chicken with chili sauce Mouth-watering chicken
Feicui xiaren Sauteed shrimps with broccoli Jadeite shrimps
Xiangcun dafengshou Raw vegetables combination A bumper harvest, village-style
Fuchsia Dunlop's most recent book is ‘Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China' (WW Norton)
中国菜单真难英译！
为迎接2008奥运会，北京市政府开展了一项规模浩大的工作：针对讲英语游客可能在餐厅菜单上看到的所有菜名，提供规范的译法。中国官方通讯社称， 政府急欲消除诸如“没有性生活的鸡”（chicken without sexual life，指童子鸡）、“丈夫和妻子的肺切片”（husband and wife's lung slice，即四川小吃“夫妻肺片”）之类的“稀奇古怪的英文译法”。该通讯社称，那种奇异的幽默感，“它们所唤起的想象，可以说，并不能引起人的食欲” 。
中餐馆菜单上吓人的错误，让来自世界各地的外国人觉得好笑。谁会忘记吃过“火烤狮子的头”（burnt lion's head，即红烧狮子头）这道菜？在网上快速搜索一下，可以看到有关“麻辣Huang炸腹部丝绸”(benumbed hot Huang fries belly silk，实为“麻辣韭黄炒肚丝”)和“香味使牛仔的骨头爆炸”(fragrance explodes the cowboy bone)等佳肴的报道。我个人最爱吃的是“铁板烧”，它被直译成iron flooring cremation（正确的译法应该是baked on an iron griddle）。
中国领导层想要消除这些令人尴尬的错误是可以理解的，尤其是在他们决心将最好的一面展现给世界的这一年。当局已敦促北京市民要有序排队，不要说脏 话。旅游餐厅被建议在奥运期间停止供应狗肉。有关部门甚至出台了一道有关着装建议的指示，其中包括不要穿着睡衣上街。在这样一个干净、整齐的奥运城市，哪 能让burnt lion's head继续存在？
说真的，中餐馆菜单确实需要翻译得像样一些。不光是因为老外可能也想在点菜的时候出出主意，而且，一顿饭吃得好不好，很大程度取决于菜点得是否合 适。如果一顿饭点了不止一道酸甜口味的菜，或者样样都是汤，那不啻于一场美食灾难。相反，一顿美餐，会让味觉得到各种各样的丰富体验。即使是在高档餐厅， 除非你对所点的菜品略知一二，包括颜色、味道和烹饪方法，是否带汤，形状和特征等，否则你无法点出一桌既刺激而又相互协调的菜肴。
即使是拟定一小部分中国菜的译名就已经够吓人的了（仅四川菜据说就有5000多道），而中餐烹饪方法的用语又是一个挑战。中国厨师使用大量的术语来 描述他们的烹饪方法，其中许多是没法翻译的。譬如，熘，意思是将材料切块后，在油或水里煮一下，然后浇上另外备好的酱。用英文如何简练地描述这道程序？一 种烹饪方法还包含着多种变化，如炒，基本的炒法叫做“烧”，高温快炒叫做“爆”，在干锅里炒叫做“干煸”。我作为一名厨师在四川培训时，必须掌握56种地 道的烹饪方法，而这只是我中餐学徒生涯的开始。将如此丰富的烹饪技巧翻译到简短的菜单上不是易事。
此外，许多种食物没有对应的英文。如“dumpling”，这个词笼统地用于概括从“饺子”、“烧卖”到“包子”等多种中国小吃。还有，如何翻译 “粉”？它可以指粉末、粗粉、面条或者淀粉做的粉条。在中国厨房记笔记时，我发现我只能用中文草草地记录，因为没有其他方法能够准确地记下我所看到、闻到 和尝到的一切。
那么，或许我们应该效仿法国菜的情况，全盘借用中文词语。不管是在吃还是做法国菜时，英语国家的人能够自如地使用像嫩煎(sauté)、蛋黄奶油酸 辣酱(hollandaise)和蛋黄酱(mayonnaise)等词。就连最基本的烹调用语，如厨师、菜单和焙盘，也是直接取自于法语。我们不能也同样 借用中文吗？在某种程度上，我们已经在这么做了。“锅”(wok)、“馄饨”(wonton)、“点心”(dim sum)和“茶”(tea)等词就源自于福建方言。一些外来的中文概念也跨越了语言的界限，如“小吃”(small eats)和“口感”(mouth-feel)，均由中文直译而来。
此外还有味道和文化底蕴的问题。四川最有名的豆腐菜是“麻婆豆腐”，它被直译为“满脸麻子的老太婆的豆腐”(pockmarked old woman's beancurd)。意思虽然亲切，但英文名初听之下像在骂人。同样，四川有一家“耙子火锅”(Cripple's Hotpot)连锁店，还有一家“痣胡子龙眼包子”(Hairy Mole Dragon-Eye Nuns)小吃店，都是以最早的经营者命名，他们其中一位是身有残疾，另一位脸上长了至少一颗带毛的痣。此外，如果你想吃烧鸡肉，你是否真的想知道菜单上 还有一道“罐闷动物生殖器官”(animal reproductive organs in pot)？有时候语言上模糊一点或许是件好事。
最后，你如何传达出许多中餐菜名中蕴含的智慧与诗意？以“担担面”为例，这是个很美的拟声词，很容易让人联想到小贩挑着篮子、沿街叫卖的情景。将它 译成shoulderpole noodles就失去了音律美；译成Dan dan noodles听起来不错，但缺乏深意。就连译法被官方通讯社点名批评的那道“夫妻肺片”，背后也有一个传说，讲的是上世纪30年代成都有一对在街上卖小 吃的夫妇，两人的婚姻非常美满，他们做的这道“辛辣味的牛内脏”很得当地人的喜爱。
北京政府努力的结果，是推出一本170页的书——《中文菜单英文译法》(Chinese Menu in English Version)。书中罗列了2000多道菜的建议译名，是一项可观的成就，对苦于英文译名的中餐馆来说更是一大飞跃。参与此项工作的二十多位翻译竭力保 留了许多有用的中文词语，如将“饺子”、“汤圆”和“烧卖”分别音译成jiaozi、tangyuan和shaomai。对于一些名声不佳的菜品（如狗 肉）则避而不用，但没有人能够指责他们作了“净化处理”，因为他们也收集了包括“蒸猪脑”和“烧鸡胗”等具有挑战性的菜肴。
然而，这份菜单不过是苍白地描绘了全世界最非凡的菜系之一。一些抒情的词语，如用于形容菜肴绿意盎然的“翡翠”，用于形容诸味齐全的“怪味”，在翻 译中都被丢失了。“麻婆豆腐”的译名也没有反映出与成都那位可亲的老妇人的关系。正如周黎明在《中国日报》所写的，这种统一译法是“一把‘双刃剑'，因为 在将那些滑稽可笑的错误译法剔除的同时，许多菜名的文化内涵也在翻译的过程中消失了。有些翻译过来的菜名就象是一碗白米饭——能够提供所需的营养，但是寡 淡无味。”
部分菜名的规范译法
菜名 官方译法 旧译及相应的中文意思
麻婆豆腐 Mapo Tofu (stir-fried tofu in hot sauce) Pock-marked old woman's beancurd
满脸麻子的老太婆的豆腐
拌双耳 Tossed black and white fungus Two ears tossed together
两只耳朵搅拌在一起
丈妻肺片 Beef and Ox Tripe in Chili Sauce ‘Man-and-wife' lung slices
丈夫和妻子的肺切片
醉鸡 Liquor-soaked chicken Drunken chicken
喝醉的鸡
怪味猪手 Braised spicy pig feet Strange-flavour pig feet
味道奇怪的猪脚
红烧狮子头 Stewed pork ball in brown sauce Red-braised lion's heads
烧红了的狮子头
鱼香肉丝 Yu-Hsiang shredded pork Fish-fragrant pork slivers
鱼香味的猪肉丝
蚂蚁上树 Sauteed vermicelli with spicy minced pork Ants climbing a tree
蚂蚁们在爬树
口水鸡 Steamed chicken with chili sauce Mouth-watering chicken
翡翠虾仁 Sauteed shrimps with broccoli Jadeite shrimps
翡翠虾
乡村大丰收 Raw vegetables combination A bumper harvest, village-style
丰收，乡村口味
邓洛普最新出版有《鱼翅与川椒：吃在中国之糖醋纪事》(Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China)与书
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