Picture in the Picture: Chinglish

While in China, we talked about “Chinglish”, the Chinese English that sometimes is a little bit hard to understand and can be very funny sometimes. We already published a fine example of English translation “free style” and while going through our pictures recently, we found a few more examples, that we really think deserve to be shown to the world as they are highly intriguing, creative and most of the time hilarious. :-)

Poor Grass! Luckily they have a nice sign to protect them! ;-)

Poor Grass! Luckily they have a nice sign to protect them! ;-)

The picture below (sorry for the quality) definitely shows one of the finest examples of Chinglish we encountered, a restaurant named “Hong Kong succeeds the sign powder gruel aristocratic family” at Guilin. We think that even Google would have translated this better!! But then, in China access to Google is forbidden. That maybe explains some things. ;-)

No idea what those words all together mean!

No idea what those words all together mean!

And thinking about it, we are actually quite happy that they don’t have any access to translator-services like Google, if not, we would not have been seeing the translation on the following picture, seen on a menu of a restaurant in Chengdu:

Strange Flavor Noodles!!!

Unfortunately they ran out of “Strange Flavor Noodles” so we didn’t get a chance to try them. Too bad! ;-)

Vera & Jean-Christophe

2 Comments

  1. Guillaume Paumier
    Posted November 1, 2009 at 15:46 | Permalink

    Héhé, the “strange flavor noodles” remind me of the “Wikipedia-flavoured beef” :) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/foodanddrink/6271674/Wikipedia-flavoured-beef-on-Chinese-restaurant-menu.html

  2. Posted August 1, 2011 at 17:48 | Permalink

    For your information, the “strange flavor noodles” in chinese means exactly the same. This is a just a straight literal translation, not that it bears any meaning to what you are ordering, though.
    To a Chinese not familiar to the region’s cuisine the name would just mean “strange flavour noodles” and he/she would not know what it is.