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Photograph taken outside a shop in Hong Kong:

This one almost tricked me.  The expression "mǐxiàn zhèn 米線陣" literally means "rice noodle array / formation".  There are many occasions where "mǐxiàn 米線" should be rendered as "[one] meter line", with "mǐ 米" serving as a phonetic transcription for "meter".  Even though this is one of the older, widespread Chinglishisms and it has been exposed numerous times (see "Selected readings" below), it is strange that machine translators are still rendering "mǐxiàn 米線" as "rice noodle". Even DeepL, "the world's most accurate translator", which gives four choices for the English translation of mǐxiàn zhèn 米線陣, cannot get beyond "rice krispies; rice noodle matrix; rice noodle soup; rice noodle formation", though I give them credit for getting zhèn 陣 right.

But now I have to step back and start all over again.

When I first saw this photograph, I didn't know the context.  I had no idea that it really was for a noodle shop.  I thought that, as so often when I encountered it in the past, "mǐxiàn 米線" was for a "[one] meter line".

Then I moved on to trying to figure out why zhèn 陣 was translated as "sense".  I thought that it was some sort of one meter "array / formation / arrangement / layout", but what kind?  At that point, I still didn't know that it was actually for a noodle shop, so I couldn't understand why zhèn 陣 was translated as "sense".  Consequently, I googled it and, much to my amazement, I realized that "mǐxiàn zhèn 米線陣" was a chain of popular noodle shops in Hong Kong.  Not only that, the English name of the chain was "mixian sense", written just like that, all in lower case.  Thus we find that the owners themselves translated zhèn 陣 as "sense", and it has spread all over Hong Kong.  Was it a mistranslation?  Was it an unusual specimen of Hong Kong English?

A Japanese definition from Wiktionary offers some reassurance:

group, team

経営(けいえい)陣(じん)、制作(せいさく)陣(じん)

keiei-jin, seisaku-jin

management team, production team

I asked several friends who live in Hong Kong and are fully fluent / native in Cantonese, Mandarin, and English, and quite familiar with Japanese as a sort of East Asian lingua franca to boot.  Here are their responses:

1. Yee Shun Abraham Chan:

I suppose the character "陣" represents a Japanese usage that means a "group, team, gang, party, or corps". So we have in Japanese terms such as keiei-jin 経営陣, seisaku-jin 制作陣, kōshi-jin 講師陣 and hōdō-jin 報道陣.

 We already have two Japanese restaurants in Hong Kong named "Gyu Jin 牛陣" and "Hon Jin 本陣" under the Tajimaya 但馬屋 Group. So the Café de Coral Group may simply want to steal the "X 陣" branding.

Perhaps they chose the word "sense" for the English name only because it sounds close enough to the Putonghua pronunciation "zhèn" of 陣.

2. Chris Fraser:

My guess about 米線陣 is that the "sense" isn't actually a translation. The marketing people probably just thought up parallel Chinese and English names, and someone liked "sense," which sounds vaguely like Canto for 陣. Although "mǐxiàn" is Mandarin for 米線, for many HKers it might as well be an English word, since it looks and sounds very different from "mai sin."

3. Eva Ng:

My guess is that they got the Chinese term 陣 from Japanese restaurants like niuzhen 牛陣 Gyujin, and 陣 in Japanese has the meaning of "camp", "group", or "corps", just like in Chinese. But they wanted an English word for 陣, and sense being (relatively) close in pronunciation (and probably in writing) to "sense", was then chosen. This is just my guess. Not sure if this makes any sense to you.

4. Pui Ling Tang:

Regarding the relation between 陣 and "sense" in Cantonese, I think the only similarity I can find is the use of "en" as their finals. Additionally, I have checked the restaurant's website, which includes the following description:

米線陣一直以創新理念打造「鮮」的產品。湯底為米線的靈魂，主打7種不同風味的湯底，其中招牌農場番茄、獨家麻辣番茄湯底為顧客提供一個鮮味的選擇。同時推出滇味酸辣、重慶酸辣、四川麻辣及香濃擔擔湯底，刺激食客味蕾。

So, I wonder if there would be any connection between "sense" and xiānwèi 鮮味 ("fresh fish and meat dishes; delicious food; fine cuisine; scrumptious dishes; umami") in their business philosophy.

As a would-be East Asian polyglot myself, I find

米線陣

mixian sense

to be creative and evocative.  It certainly fits the criteria for "Language that exercises the brain; poetry and gradations of understanding" (1/7/24).

Selected readings

• "Drawing a line in the noodles" (8/14/11)
• "'Please wait outside a noodle'" (12/29/20)

January 11, 2024 @ 7:53 pm · Filed by Victor Mair under Found in translation, Multilingualism

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