Machines and menus

I have written before of the problems of machine translation. It is particularly difficult with menus because the machine doesn’t ‘know’ that it is dealing with a menu. That explains what has till now been my favourite: vino y cava was translated not as wine and cava but as it came and it digs, which is quite right because vino is the third person past of venir (come) and cava is the third person present of cavar (dig).

But today I had lunch in a small (and perfectly pleasant) restaurant where the English menu offered entrecote irons, gutter of meat, soup of Wales, shave with sauce, and – amazingly – sausage with Jews, which I sincerely hope was not a pork sausage! What had happened was this:

• A plancha is a griddle, the kind of hotplate heated from below that is used in all Spanish restaurant kitchens, but as a verb planchar means to iron clothes and the computer had read it as the third person present of that verb.
• A canelón is a gutter, but in English we use the Italian name cannelloni for the pasta. I actually had this and it turned out to be a single (and thus singular), rather large pasta roll filled with meat instead of the smaller tubes that are more common.
• Sopa de galets is a Catalan soup containing pasta shells. It had been put incorrectly as sopa de gales and that had been copied to Spanish. Gales is the Spanish name for Wales.
• Shave with sauce is a new one. In Spanish it is rape con salsa, which is monkfish with sauce. There are a number of obvious classic blunders with the name of that fish (rape seaman-style, rape on a bed of spinach, and so on) but this one has been caused by an association with the verb rapar, which is to shave as in a shaven head, not normal shaving of the face.
• Judías are beans. They are also Jewish women. The computer guessed wrong.

Comments

[Mike]

Mr. Harvey, I'm a longtime project manager for a translation firm in California. A friend of mine sent this picture a few months back. Is it the same restaurant?

http://tinyurl.com/bnz646

[Peter Harvey]

Mike,
No, it isn't the same place -- which is worrying!