Why you shouldn’t use Google to translate menus

It’s tough work but someone’s got to do it. I am talking of the thankless task of visiting Spanish restaurants to read their menus and look for bad translation. Such is the nature of this task that sometimes meals have to be eaten and wine drunk in those restaurants. So, here goes with my latest report.

In a restaurant in Alicante of which I choose not to remember the name – because it’s a nice, friendly restaurant with good food – a diner might well work out that Pork lion should be Pork loin, our old friend lomo, but the translation of Chipirones as Mushrooms rather than Baby squid might lead to confusion.

But that would be nothing compared to what awaits us in the desserts section. Tocino de cielo is not for the faint-hearted; it is a sweet made of egg yolks, cream and sugar. However, the translation of its name as Dumbfounded sky bacon is not going to help anyone. It is true that tocino is salt pork belly and that cielo is sky or heaven (I have no idea how the dish got its Spanish name) so the sky bacon is just about understandable. But where did the dumbfounded come from? Could it, could it just, be that it was an annotation by a native speaker who was dumbfounded to be offered sky bacon?

Be that as it may, our dumbfounded diner who passes on the Sky bacon is heading for real danger further down the menu. Those who know Spanish will recognise Piña as Pineapple but our English-speaker will find himself faced with the possibility of ordering – a Fragmentation hand grenade!

Comments

[Barrie]

Such things add to the gaiety of nations.

[Candide]

For similarity of shape, piña means hand grenade in Spanish military jargon.

[Laura]

Nice post! Google Translate might be helpful in some contexts, but definitely not to translate texts that are going to be published without being revised before. This kind of misfortunes also happen when the translation is given to relatives or to some guy in a bar who once went to London instead of hiring a professional translation... I really don't know if it's a matter of ignorance or meanness...
Btw, "chiparrones" should be "chipirones" :)

[Traductor Jurado]

There is certain resemblance between "tocino de cielo":
http://lacocinadebender.com/tocino-de-cielo/postres-pasteleria
and "tocino":
http://www.gastronomiavasca.net/recipes/picture?recipe_id=1329

Hence the Spanish name.

[Peter Harvey]

Laura,

Thank you. I agree that Google can have its place, for example in getting an idea of what a newspaper article or letter says, but it should never be used for anything for presentation. I am a translator myself (among other things) and I have translated a few menus in my time. They are not easy, but with machine translation there is the added point that the software doesn't 'know' that it is dealing with a menu. And it goes without saying that all translation should be done by someone with an expert knowledge of the target language. I think it's ignorance and meanness (menus, while often difficult, are short and cheap to translate) but also just not caring. Another problem is that even if the translation is done properly, the client will want to make changes later on and does so himself instead of going back to the translator. I had a problem recently with a very respectable and serious medical organisation that changed a web site after I had translated it. Mistakes were introduced that would have reflected on my competence if I hadn't spotted them and insisted that my work must not be changed in any way.

Thanks too for the correction, which I have incorporated. Maybe I was getting mixed up with camarones (that bit came from menu, no photo), but the nomenclature of seafood is a minefield in which my knowledge is imperfect.

[Peter Harvey]

TJ,

Now that you mention it, there is a similarity in appearance. I'm not much of a dessert person* and tocino de cielo is something I avoid.

*Or a tocino person, come to that.