Exterminate Capitalism Lobster Package.

Tiny Dish of Chef's Sincerity.

"'Tiny Dish of Chef's Sincerity' I can sort of understand, but 'Exterminate Capitalism Lobster Package'??" I agree with Ben that the second part is intelligible enough, but how do you get from Tāotiè lóngxiā cān 饕餮龙虾餐 to "Exterminate Capitalism Lobster Package"? The answer is that there is no way you can get from there to here. Fair enough, lóngxiā means "lobster," and cān in this case signifies a complete meal, i.e., a "package." But Tāotiè is the name of an ancient mythological monster (often translated as "glutton"). Since Tāotiè is a bisyllabic morpheme (neither tāo nor tiè means anything by itself [there are plenty of such bisyllabic morphemes in Old Sinitic]), it is absolutely impossible to break Tāotiè down into anything that might mean "Exterminate Capitalism." Therefore, my conclusion is that somebody was playing around with whomever was responsible for preparing this menu and mischievously provided an absurd translation, perhaps with the intention of poking fun at the Chinese Communist system which has given rise to such luxurious and fancy dining practices as reflected in pretentious menus of this sort.

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5 Responses:

  1. J. Peterson says:

    They should add ** TRANSLATE SERVER ERROR ** to the menu as well.

  2. Rich says:

    There was a thing in the Register about attacking translation tools with "obvious typos" to take advantage of weirdnesses in the models. Ignoring words, changing the meaning; it reminded them of the "that banana looks like a toaster to me" thing, which they'd covered earlier. A link? Let's see... I enjoyed it, anyway.

  3. Cat Mara says:

    EXTERMINATE ALL RATIONAL CAPITALISM LOBSTER PACKAGE

  4. internetimal says:

    "Wolverines!"

  5. Kaleberg says:

    Avoid the jackal eyed specter of dishpan hands.

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