TAIPEI (Taiwan News) -- A student at Taiwan's National Chiao Tung University on Friday posted a photo of a menu listing a dish translated into English as "control meat rice," causing a lot of chuckles and scratching of heads as to how the sign maker got it so wrong.
Posted on the popular Facebook page with Chiao Tung University students, CowBei (靠北交大), the caption simply read "the meat controller." The dish in English not only reads "control meat rice" (控肉飯), but the first Chinese character Kong (control, 控) in the name is in fact wrong. Instead, it should be Kong (stewed, 焢).
In an interview with Apple Daily, Soochow University Chinese to English translation expert Tseng Tai-yuan (曾泰元), in situations like this it's best to use the phonetic spelling rather than a literal translation. Therefore it would be better to translate it as "Kong Rou Fan" said Tseng. Alternatively, he suggested it could be translated in a more descriptive way "Soy-stewed Pork with Rice."
Meanwhile, netizens discovered that copy and pasting the erroneous Chinese name "控肉飯" into Google Translate, will indeed yield the results "control meat rice."
Netizens also noticed the iconic General Tso's Chicken (左宗棠雞) was simply translated with the a very nondescript name "Chicken rice." One example of a nonsensical, word-for-word translation for General Tso's Chicken is "Left Brown Candy Chicken Rice."
Imgur image.