Beijing Olympic Officials Eyeing Restaurant Menus

Filed in archive Olympics on September 5, 2007

If you're looking at the picture wondering if its time for Thanksgiving, the answer is no. It's just the Beijing Olympic officials have struck again. This time, they're focusing in on restaurant menus.

Apparently, some Chinese restaurants in Beijing have "virgin chicken" and "steamed crap" listed on the menu. What is steamed crap? To prevent confusion, the Beijing Tourism Bureau released a list of proper names for the most mistranslated items. Darn, I was looking forward to eating "burnt lion's head" on a future trip to China.

"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.