She would evaporate slippery chickens were north
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Just because I haven't written a post about Chinglish for many moons doesn't mean that it has disappeared. In fact, the following is such a paramount specimen that I would be remiss not to bring it to the attention of Language Log readers.
From C. Grieve (who comments "I'm assuming the restaurant was a greasy spoon . . .") via Elizabeth Barber:
I will begin with a simple transcription (characters plus Hanyu Pinyin):
dòuchǐ běirú zhēng huájī 豆豉北茹蒸滑鸡
For the translation, I'll go through the whole name of the dish bit by bit:
dòuchǐ 豆豉 ("fermented soya beans; black bean sauce") — everybody who is familiar with my taste in Chinese cuisine knows that this is my favorite ingredient
běirú 北茹 (refers to vegetables typical of the north, including various types of mushrooms; pictures of such dishes may be seen here)
zhēng 蒸 ("steamed")
huájī 滑鸡 ("chicken with corn starch or other similar thickener", hence huá 滑 ["smooth; slippery"])
The Chinglish translation does not account for the dòuchǐ 豆豉 ("fermented soya beans; black bean sauce"), which may be so far beyond the translator's English ken that they didn't even want to attempt it, and the rú 茹 ("vegetables; roots", etc.), an old-fashioned word that is not well known by people of middling literacy, may be the source of the "she" in the Chinglish, because it has a female component — nǚ 女 — lurking it its construction, but it's only a part of the phonophore.
[Thanks to Fangyi Cheng and Xiuyuan Mi]
Thomas Rees said,
April 11, 2017 @ 4:56 pm
What is 南北合 (nánběi hé)?
John Swindle said,
April 11, 2017 @ 4:58 pm
I wonder whether your correspondents might have noticed the picture on Engrish.com. It was posted there yesterday, April 10, with credit to Amelia Shevenelle and a note that the sign was found in Shanghai.
Thomas Rees said,
April 11, 2017 @ 5:04 pm
Oh, I see: it’s a restaurant name.
Michael Watts said,
April 11, 2017 @ 6:40 pm
I wouldn't want to assume the restaurant was a greasy spoon; the cheapest class of restaurant in Shanghai (and, presumably, elsewhere in China) doesn't bother to have any English at all. This struck me as indicating a somewhat classier place.
Fluxor said,
April 12, 2017 @ 3:39 am
This post feels like a fractal of errors, where an error in the Chinese contributes to an error in the translation which then contributes to an error in the post trying to explain where the translation error may have come from, but erroneously translates the error in the Chinese.
The dish itself is standard Cantonese fare — steamed chicken with shiitake mushrooms in a black bean sauce. The first error is found in the fourth character of the dish. It should be 菇 (mushroom), not 茹. The two characters are so similar and the character for mushroom so common that most Chinese readers would probably not even have noticed the typo. 北菇 (literally, northern mushroom) refers to a type of shiitake that is flatter and darker than the Japanese variety and is typically used in Cantonese cooking. This particular type of mushroom is traditionally cultivated in southern China, but in the northern part of the province of Guangdong (Canton). Hence the name.
The next error is, of course, the wacky translation. I've only ever seen 茹 being used as a surname and even then, I've ever only known one family with that name. Not a common character. No doubt the (auto?)translator had a tough time and Prof Mair's speculation that this character is the source of "she" is probably as good as any.
The next error is in the post itself, where a translation of 北茹 was attempted rather than noticing it as a typo. This then naturally leads to an erroneous explanation that this word "refers to vegetables typical of the north".
If there were no Chinese typo in the first place, the auto-translation would've probably ended up being passable, and we wouldn't be discussion it here at LL.
B.Ma said,
April 12, 2017 @ 3:56 am
北茹 seems to be a common "typo" for 北菇, but I suppose it is more likely to come about from a handwriting IME than a pinyin IME.
A Google search reveals that the commonest hit for 北茹 is as part of 北茹阿澤魯, the "translation" of the Brazilian city Juazeiro do Norte. This translation appears to be created by a Wikipedian who has a prediliction for creating random Chinese "translations" for obscure city names on Wikipedia which other websites then treat as being official.
unekdoud said,
April 12, 2017 @ 6:49 am
This is just a wild guess, but could the horrible grammar and "she would" be the result of machine translation through a different language? (Not sure how that would happen, though.)
flow said,
April 12, 2017 @ 7:38 am
Google translate has it much succincter:
豆豉北茹蒸滑鸡: Dried soy bean curd
豆豉北菇蒸滑鸡: Bean curd
I for one welcome the efficiency of our new neural-network powered overlords.
"北茹阿澤魯 [for] Juazeiro do Norte […] appears to be created by a Wikipedian who has a prediliction for creating random Chinese "translations" for obscure city names on Wikipedia which other websites then treat as being official"—which Wikipedia can then cite as evidence for said coinages. What's not to like?
Victor Mair said,
April 12, 2017 @ 7:41 am
From the o.p.:
běirú 北茹 (refers to vegetables typical of the north, including various types of mushrooms; pictures of such dishes may be seen here)
Jonathan Smith said,
April 12, 2017 @ 7:01 pm
Seems most likely to have been a character-shape IME. The shipu link is just showing search results on the (incorrect?) string "北茹蒸鸡". This is interesting as it illustrates the birth of a zombie word (in other cases we get zombie characters). On the other hand ru2 茹 'eat' seems to be a real word… I wonder where it is from?
Victor Mair said,
April 13, 2017 @ 7:03 am
Rú 茹 is amply attested with about a dozen different meanings, including "vegetables" and "eat", going back to at least the Han period more than two thousand years ago. See Hànyǔ dà cídiǎn 汉语大词典 (Unabridged Dictionary of Sinitic), 9.396ab.
I showed this entrée name, dòuchǐ běirú zhēng huájī 豆豉北茹蒸滑鸡, to half a dozen highly literate native speakers of Chinese (several of whom are foodies and / or vegetarians), and not one of them so much as blinked an eye.
Maybe the zombies have already taken over!
Jonathan Smith said,
April 13, 2017 @ 8:44 am
Hmm, Prof. Mair is right that my use of "zombie" is incorrect as concerns ru2 茹 as such. What I wanted to suggest was that if bei3ru2zheng1ji1 北茹蒸雞 'northern vegetables steamed chicken' was not a thing in the past, this and many similar signs and their readers have now given it some kind of ontological status — native readers of Chinese, particularly those versed in the classical tradition, often err on the side of "trying to process" marginal characters.
I personally would be interested to know now whether the LL correspondents (1) think this is a typo for 菇 and they just read over it the first time; (2) thought on first read that 北茹 might could be a thing but now feel it is a typo for 菇 given further study (this is me); or (3) held and still hold that 北茹 is or could be a thing.
liuyao said,
April 13, 2017 @ 10:15 am
In response to Jonathan, as a literate native Mandarin speaker, and not so much a food enthusiast, I don't recognize 北茹 as a compound word. 茹 is indeed rare in Modern Chinese, but if you tell a native MSM speaker it's the rú as in hanxinruku they would know the phrase (含辛茹苦), and could infer or recall that rú means to eat.
北菇 would sound a little less obscure, but still not a recognizable word when spoken, or without context. By the link that VHM provided, and given that it was most likely input by pinyin, I don't think it was a typo.
liuyao said,
April 13, 2017 @ 10:22 am
Sorry I didn't see the Wikipedia link that Jonathan provided. Now I truly don't know. Might have to ask the restaurant.
Fluxor said,
April 13, 2017 @ 10:29 am
Note that in the link given showing search results of 北茹蒸鸡, not a single search result showing names of various dishes actually contain the character 茹 (ru2) while many contain the character 菇 (gu1; mushroom), further indicating that 茹 is simply a typo of 菇.
@Jonathan Smith, I'm definitely in camp #1 — read over it the first time. I'd imagine if 北茹 was actually a thing related to food, it would turn up a few more results from google or baidu.
Try to re-imagine this post with languages reversed. Let's say that on a Chinese blog, someone came upon a menu item that says "Pizza with pepperoni and mashroom", with a non-sensical Chinese translation for "mashroom". Readers then go on to debate whether "mashroom" is an actual word depicting real food, perhaps a neologism. Someone comes by and mentions that pizza with pepperoni and "mushroom" is something very common in the western world and that it's simply a typo. However, debate continues. After all, searching online does end up with real usages of "mashroom" to mean "mushroom" (https://www.facebook.com/MashroomFarming/). Debate continues…
Fluxor said,
April 13, 2017 @ 10:49 am
@liuyao — 北菇 is a common word in Cantonese cuisine. Go to the streets of Hong Kong and pronounce the words in Cantonese (in the context of food), and I'll bet almost everyone will know what you are saying. Just remember to use it in the context of food, as 北姑 (same pronunciation) has a completely different meaning. Northerners tend to use 香菇 or 冬菇rather than 北菇.
Even in Hong Kong, 冬菇 is probably used more often although 北菇 seems to be used when cooked in conjunction with chicken. Don't know why, but that's just my personal observation. I think xxx北菇yyy雞 is standard dish naming nomenclature whenever shiitake and chicken are cooked together, where xxx and yyy indicate other ingredients.
A quick personal anecdote. I was in Taipei this past February and my colleague took me to a dimsum restaurant chain called Tim Ho Wan (添好運). It serves very standard dimsum fare (nothing too interesting) and it has 臘腸北菇雞飯 (rice with sausage, mushroom, and chicken) on the menu. I didn't order it, but the point is 北菇 is a very common word in Cantonese cuisine.
liuyao said,
April 13, 2017 @ 12:21 pm
Thank you, @Fluxor, for providing more information. Yes I recognize 香菇 and 冬菇, and I'm now of the opinion that it was a mistake in the Chinese original.
Jonathan Smith said,
April 13, 2017 @ 1:02 pm
@Fluxor
Your suggested reversal is nice, but there are special features of the Chinese situation: ru2 茹 (= "mash" of your "mashroom") is obscure and mysterious but involves a perfectly cromulent Chinese character which appears in dictionaries and early texts, where we learn it to bear some relation to food/eating. This makes the error very difficult to perceive for those of us, Chinese and non-Chinese alike, not intimately familiar with the word or collocation bei3gu1 北菇.
To thicken the fog, I noticed folks online including Cantonese speakers occasionally using not only 姑 in this context, a fairly normal kind of replacement (note the odd ending of the wiki article I linked), but also gu1 菰, which might present more of a mystery.
Fluxor said,
April 13, 2017 @ 9:34 pm
@Jonathan Smith
I've seen 菰 instead of 菇 on menus before. I just assumed it was an alternate character for the same thing.
A quick dictionary look up shows it to be so:
http://www.zdic.net/z/22/js/83F0.htm
Victor Mair said,
April 14, 2017 @ 8:51 am
One thing we can be sure of: běirú 北茹 is not a hapax legomenon that is unique to the sign pictured at the top of this post (search on "北茹滑鸡"). Regardless of how and when it got started, běirú 北茹 is clearly "out there", and it is getting passed around.
Since běirú 北茹 is by no means unique to the sign pictured at the top of this post, it cannot be held accountable for the mangled Chinglish of the sign, which is the subject of the o.p.
The first group of informants that I polled for the original post were all Ph.D.'s or Ph.D. candidates in premodern Chinese studies. They were not fazed by dòuchǐ běirú zhēng huájī 豆豉北茹蒸滑鸡. They took the běirú 北茹 part to be "northern veggies (including mushrooms)" and just moved on.
Now, it is very interesting that, yesterday in an Introduction to Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese course composed mostly of M.A. students from China who are in the humanities, they had more problems with běirú 北茹 than did the Ph.D. students. (N.B.: The students from China in the Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese course had all taken LS / CC classes before, but were enrolled in my class because they needed a more rigorous philological foundation than they had hitherto acquired.)
Of the 12 students who were in yesterday's class, we may break down their responses concerning běirú 北茹 as follows:
1. interpreted it as "northern mushrooms" 7 — about half of these questioned the rú 茹 character
2. interpreted it as "northern beautiful" 1
3. interpreted it as "???" 2
4. interpreted it as "some vegetable" 1
5. interpreted it as "veggies" 1
Another curious fact emerged from yesterday's little experiment. It is not directly related to the matter of běirú 北茹, but it has a great deal to do with another topic that has often been addressed on Language Log. In discussing what the students would do if they did not know how to write a given character (the character amnesia problem), even if they knew how to pronounce it, nine of the students said they would just fill in the missing character with Pinyin, whereas three of the students said they would leave a blank space. They said they would absolutely refuse to fill in the blank with Pinyin. When I asked them why, they said, "It just doesn't seem right". These three students, by the way, are from Chinese departments in China and / or have been studying ancient Chinese subjects in America. The other students, those nine who are willing to insert Pinyin for characters they do not know how to write, tend to be engaged in more recent or modern topics in Chinese studies and to have received their undergraduate education in America.
Stella said,
April 20, 2017 @ 12:18 am
Indeed, I could see two groups of opinions in the comments of this post. Some of you insist that there is no error in Chinese name of this dish “豆豉北茹滑鸡”. But the others deny that and consider “茹” should be “菇”. Out of curiosity, I’ve searched for the meaning of “茹” in Baidu and some information about “冬茹” popping out. And actually, “冬茹” is another name of “冬菇” called by people in some district of China. It is a kind of mushroom which can grow only under low temperature. Thus, I believe that there is no error in the Chinese name of this dish. Exactly, The original intention of the poster is to point out the confusing translation into English. It is so vital to get a proper translation of Chinese food. They hold a responsibility not only to let foreigners know what the ingredients is but more important to disseminate Chinese culture. But it causes difficulties to translate Chinese dishes names on account of the plentiful ingredients and figures of speech Chinese like to use to add more enjoyment.Many literary and historical materials should be referred to when translating name of Chinese dishes. Besides, local culture and customs are ought to be considered at the same time.