Reposted from my LinkedIn article:
I’ve been meaning to write something about Chinese food translations for a while.
But it’s impossible to write about Chinese food translations. It’s just too big. The CNN headline says it all.
Food is already a huge topic. And Chinese food? That’s the dragon of food. You can’t separate it from the culture, and that culture goes back five millennia. To give you a taste, in Chinese, we don’t ask “how are you” when we see someone, we ask “chī le mā?” – did you eat?
Translating Chinese food is no easy feat. And in my opinion, when people talk about “translating” names of dishes, it’s rarely actual translation. Most of the time, it’s romanisation, guesswork, or straight-up improvisation. Sometimes, it’s a game of Chinese whispers (or broken telephone if you want the PG (CNN) version).
The CNN article highlights one of the difficulties with Chinese food translation, which is the lack of comparable “foods, cooking methods, concepts, and food shapes”. I agree with that. But I think the core issue is deeper. It’s culture. The way Chinese people think about eating is fundamentally different from how the West approaches food. And they think (and talk) about it A LOT!
I’m not some Chinese food snob. I’ve lived outside of China since my teens. But bless my parents for being good cooks and instilling in me what a proper Chinese meal should be. At the very least, it includes a meat dish (meat or fish), a veggie dish (cold or warm) and a soup to pull it all together. That’s fàn (food). That’s home.
These days, I’m used to one-pan meals or tossing a salad on the side when I remember something about vitamins and fibres. The standards just don’t line up. Especially living in Germany, land of sauerkraut, sausages and potatoes.
Back to translation. There’s no golden rule. You can go literal and call fūqī fèipiàn “husband and wife lung slices,” which is weird and wonderful and sticks in your head. Or you can use a bit of imagination and go for a name like “Cuts of hearts”, which actually hints at what the dish is (usually a mix of beef heart, tongue, tripe, and other meat bits in a spicy sauce) and adds a sort of poetic edge. That might fly in a bougie fusion joint that wants to overcharge ignorant hobby foodies rather than an “authentic” Chinese restaurant.
Personally, I like “husband and wife lung slices”. And for non-Chinese people, quirky literal translations of Chinese dishes are just part of the experience.
Link to cited original CNN article: https://edition.cnn.com/travel/chinese-food-translations-english-menus-intl-hnk/index.html
