'Virgin Chicken' Off the Menu in Beijing
BEIJING
(AP) - Hungry visitors to next summer's Beijing Olympics won't
have to choose between "steamed crap" and "virgin
chicken" if Chinese authorities succeed in ridding restaurant
menus of mangled English translations.
The
Beijing Tourism Bureau has released a list with 2,753 proposed
names for dishes and drinks, designed to replace bizarre and sometimes
ridiculous translations on menus, the official Xinhua News Agency
reported Friday.
Foreigners
are often stumped by dish names such as "virgin chicken"
(a young chicken dish) or "burnt lion's head" (Chinese-style
pork meatballs). Other garbled names include "The temple
explodes the chicken cube" (kung pao chicken) or "steamed
crap" (steamed carp).
"These
translations either scare or embarrass foreign customers and may
cause misunderstanding on China's diet habits," Xinhua said.
It's
the latest effort by Beijing Olympics organizers to clean up the
city and ensure that the best image is presented to the hundreds
of thousands of visitors expected next summer.
Etiquette
campaigns are afoot to stamp out bad manners such as jumping ahead
in line, spitting, littering and reckless driving. The revised
menu names are part of an effort to ban unintelligible English,
known as "Chinglish," that abounds on signs everywhere.
A
team set up by the Beijing Municipal Foreign Affairs Office and
Beijing Tourism Bureau has been working on the menu names for
more than a year, Xinhua said. Translators developed names for
dishes based on one of four categories: ingredients, cooking method,
taste, or the name of a person or place.
For
example, a dish with mushrooms and ducks' feet will be listed
as simply "Mushroom-Duck's Foot." Others proposed names
include "Fish Filets in Hot Chili Oil" and "Crispy
Chicken."
The
tourism bureau is soliciting public opinion on the translations.
Once a final decision is made on the list of names, they will
be used in restaurants across China, Xinhua said.
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