12 thoughts on “Engrish that’s hard to explain”

  1. Reminds me of the Chinese restaurant we used to frequent in America. They paid for a nice, expensive glowing menu sign and neglected a spell check.

    Items included:

    -Human Family
    -Spitty Beef

    I’m not gonna rule out that they may have been trafficking humans and were perhaps extremely honest about hygiene

  2. I think that Joe should be allowed to do one of these posts every few years without getting dissed.

    Speaking of Engrish – I was really impressed by “Gokiburi to the heaven”. Whoever wrote that copy is the George Orwell (or whoever your favorite prose master is) of Engrish.

  3. I am acutely aware that Engrish is done to death in the blogosphere. This is just one of the most ridiculous examples I have ever seen.

  4. Also, that restaurant left us with the sublime moment in life of catching a little chinese kid wearing a San Fransico 49ers Jersey that said ‘Rice’ on the back…

    We always wondered which he was actually a fan of….

    I never ordered the Human Family…..there were always cargo container ships washing up nearby and spilling out Chinese people….It seemed a little too real…

  5. “Human Family” is funny but it’s probably just a mislabeling of “Happy Family,” which I’ve seen on other Chinese menus in the US.

    What really gets me about the translation above is that, as per the title of this post, I have no clue how they got to “the bleeding.” Can anyone figure that out?

  6. My guess would be that the person who did the “translation” looked up 血染み (chijimi-blood stained) instead of Shijimi 蜆 – the type of clam that is being used to flavor the soup.

  7. “Human Family” is funny but it’s probably just a mislabeling of “Happy Family,” which I’ve seen on other Chinese menus in the US.

    We used to get “Sizzling Happy Family” on a regular basis at a place in Eugene, OR back in the early 1980s. Good stuff.

    Then there was my college roommate: we’d been out to eat tendon at a Japanese restaurant, and he liked it, so he ordered the tendon on the menu at another Asian joint he went to for lunch one day, and it turned out to be beef tendon. Not exactly Engrish, but FWIW.

Comments are closed.