Saturday, July 28, 2007

light reading: Engrish menu in Japan

We have heard enough about bad/mechanical translation of Chinese menu into Engrish, and that Beijing has launched campaigns to clean this "racist park" fun away from us, preparing for the Olympic.

This will be something anyone with a sense of humour will surely miss. I wonder if those activists who are camping out of Queen's Pier in HK care to sit out for this piece of collective memory / 集体回忆 for us. Perhaps not, they only care about the colonial nostalgia and where their old colonial masters landed.

But no worry, our neighbour, the Japanese, now come to the rescue



FYI, "asspara" is not a para-para dance with the bottom. it is a vegetable that we all know, translated into Japanese Katagana with some truncation in phonetics and translated back to Engrish again losing some more fidelity. (like compressing a picture file into jpeg and then to gif and back to jpg again -- if that makes it easier to understand) As for "Shrimp and cock soboro hammering out pasta curry cream", I will leave your imagination to figure out what it is. All I can say is that I know how to distinguish male lobsters from female ones, but I have never been able to identify the same part of the body for shrimps.

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