Husband-and-wife lung slices? Why translating Chinese food names into English is ‘an impossible task’

By Maggie Hiufu Wong, CNN

Hong Kong (CNN) — Is xiaolongbao a bao or a dumpling? What exactly are “husband-and-wife lung slices” made of?

With international travel to China on the rise, thanks much in part to its friendlier tourist visa policies, foreigners will inevitably encounter some amusing restaurant menu translations as they experience the country’s culinary delights.

But those who attempt to come up with English names for these dishes aren’t to be blamed for the often unusual and occasionally alarming results. Nor are the translation apps. According to Isaac Yue, an associate professor of translation at the University of Hong Kong and a scholar of Chinese gastronomy literature, translating Chinese food names into English is simply “an impossible task.”

“You can translate shizitou (a popular dish from around eastern China and Shanghai) figuratively as ‘Chinese meatball’ or literally as ‘braised lion’s head’ but neither fully captures the dish’s essence or cultural context,” he offers as an example.

Yue isn’t exaggerating. Even though he writes about Chinese gastronomy in English, the scholar doesn’t let this work crossover into his translation teachings.

“I contemplated focusing my research on translating Chinese food but at the end of the day, all I could say about that is, well, it’s all so untranslatable,” he concludes.

‘An extraordinarily complex culinary culture’

To answer why translating the names of these foods is so tricky, one needs to look at China’s long culinary history, which has layered many dishes with stories and imagery.

Fuchsia Dunlop, a British food writer who has specialized in Chinese cuisine for over two decades, says much of the problem stems from the fact certain words don’t even exist in English.

“China has an extraordinarily complex culinary culture with a highly specific vocabulary, and in many cases, we do not have equivalent foods, cooking methods, concepts and food shapes in English,” she says.

Dunlop suggests borrowing terms in Chinese — similar to how we use French words like “chef” and “omelet.”

The multi-tonal nature of Chinese languages like Mandarin and Cantonese may make it less intuitive for some, but it’s not impossible with education.

And while recent years have seen improvements in online translation tools, Dunlop still encounters amusing mistranslations in her travels around China.

Among her favorite examples is stir-fried cabbage, which she saw translated as “handbag food.” This is because the word for Chinese cabbage, baocai, is made up of two Chinese characters. Bao means “bag,” and cai means “dish/food/vegetables.”

Dunlop also points to a translation she came across for a cookie called tieban shao. The cookie is baked (shao) on an iron plate (tieban) but the translation in English was “iron flooring cremation.”

Here, we take a look at some other puzzling dish names you might come across during your next visit to a Chinese restaurant and clear up some popular misunderstandings about certain foods.

All the dumplings

In English, the word “dumpling” is a catchall phrase, referring to everything from jiaozi, wontons and baozi to siu mai and xiaolongbao, which puzzles some Chinese speakers.

“This is an incredibly confusing subject because the English word ‘dumpling’ originally referred to balls of dough that were cooked in a stew — but now it is used for a vast range of Chinese snacks with stuffings that are nothing like an English dumpling, and all have their own names in Chinese,” says Dunlop.

Here are some distinct “dumplings”:

• Jiaozi: Or just jiao. Crescent-shaped encased dumplings with fillings, typically steamed, pan-fried or boiled.
• Wonton: Smaller dumplings with long, thin wrapper “tails.” The deep-fried version usually contains measly amounts of meat — no, your local Chinese restaurant isn’t being stingy — and a side of a sweet and sour dipping sauce. Although wontons are neither Cantonese (wan tan) nor Mandarin (yun tun), it’s an acceptable translation.
• Baozi: Steamed pastry made with leavened dough with folds on top (these can also be flipped upside down and pan-fried, referred to as shengjian bao).
• Siu mai: Should be pronounced as siu mai instead of shumai (shoo-mai), if you want to get it right in Cantonese. These steamed morsels have a thin wrapper that remains open on top. (Dim sim, a popular street food in Australia, was inspired by siu mai and named after a dialect word for dim sum used in China’s southern Taishan region.)
• Tang yuan/Yuan xiao: These rice balls, which may or may not have fillings, are often sweet, but they are more accurately called rice balls than sweet rice dumplings.

Conclusion: While it isn’t wrong to just call them all dumplings, most Chinese refer only to jiaozi as such.

Xiaolongbao

The name of these beloved soup-filled dumplings blurs categories. Xiaolongbao means “little basket bao,” referring to the bamboo steamer they are cooked in.

With its unleavened, thinner wrapper, xiaolongbao resembles a jiaozi but is technically a baozi. Confused yet? Invented in the Song Dynasty, it was created in a form closer to a bao and had a thicker, leavened skin that was stuffed with a gelatin broth that liquefied when steamed.

Sometimes they are called tangbao (soup bao) in Chinese.

Conclusion: It’s a bao and a jiao hybrid.

Turnip cake vs radish cake

Lo baak gou, often called turnip cake, contains no turnip. It’s a savory patty of shredded white radish, dried shrimp and mushrooms.

Guo-qing Song, an associate professor in horticulture at Michigan State University, notes that the plant used in it is a raphanus raphanistrum subp. sativus — the scientific name of a white radish.

“Radish is one of the major vegetables (along with Chinese cabbage) in the northern part of the Yangtze River in winter,” says Song.

The mistranslation likely stems from visual similarities and regional dialects.

Conclusion: It should actually be called radish cake. You can also refer to it by its Cantonese name (lo baak gou), which is a dim sum dish from the region.

Husband-and-wife lung slices

This spicy Sichuan appetizer has a confusing misnomer: it contains neither romance nor lung. Husband-and-wife long slices — fuqi fei pian — is an assortment of thinly sliced beef offal in chili oil.

Legends suggest that the dish was originally sold by a loving couple on the streets of Chengdu.

One could easily translate it to be “sliced beef offal in a spicy sauce,” but this would lack flair and take away from the experience. Dunlop recommends restaurants stick with less literal names in cases like this.

“I think it’s fun to keep the poetry wherever possible, but sometimes you then need an extra line on the menu to explain what the dish actually is,” she says.

When consulting for Barshu, a Sichuan restaurant in London, Dunlop decided to use literal translations on the menu, allowing room for cultural context and extra information.

“You can see translation as part of a more general project to promote cultural understanding of Chinese food: as these dishes become more familiar to foreigners, their traditional names will also become familiar, just like ‘shepherd’s pie’ and ‘carbonara,’” she says.

Conclusion: In Chinese, it’s called fuqi fei pian. In this case, it’s fun to keep the original meaning in the translated name — husband-and-wife lung slices — but a description would be a nice menu addition.

Fish-fragrant eggplant

Another misleading Sichuan dish, yuxiang qiezi, or “fish-fragrant eggplant,” contains no fish.

The name was inspired by its seasonings — pickled chilies, ginger, garlic, scallion, sugar and vinegar — which were often used in traditional fish-based dishes in the region.

“Sometimes people just translate it as ‘spicy Sichuan eggplant’, which is helpful, but loses the local cultural flavor. I always translate it as ‘fish-fragrant eggplant’ anyway because it sounds lovely, and I hope English speakers will get to know this dish,” says Dunlop.

As the dish traveled to other regions around China, some started adding dried salted fish to the dish to boost its fish fragrance.

Conclusion: Though not accurate, let’s stick with fish-fragrant eggplant. It’s a delicious dish with a fun backstory.

Pineapple buns

Called bo lo baau in Cantonese, these popular bao don’t actually contain any pineapple.

A traditional baked good from Hong Kong, the pineapple bun features a sweet milk bread base. Its exterior crust is made of lard or butter, sugar, flour, milk powder, baking soda, baking powder and egg, resulting in a crackled surface when baked.

The name comes from the bun’s checkered pattern, which resembles a pineapple peel.

It’s typically enjoyed plain or with a thick slab of butter in the middle (bo lo yau/pineapple butter).

Conclusion: Pineapple bun is an ok translation, though pineapple lovers might be disappointed when they bite into one.

Buddha jumping over the wall

Fotiaoqiang is a sumptuous soup from Fujian province that’s known for its lavish ingredients, including abalone and sea cucumber.

The dish is said to have an aroma so alluring and it tempted a vegetarian monk to leap over a temple wall just to find out what the smell was.

Conclusion: Both fotiaoqiang and “Buddha jumping over the wall” work well for an English menu and add a fun bit of historic flavor.

Lion’s head

In a collection of anecdotic essays by Xu Ke written during the Qing Dynasty, he said of one dish, “The lion’s head, named by reason of its resemblance — a pork meatball it is.”

Shizitou, in Mandarin, originated from the northeastern part of China and became particularly popular in Huaiyang, a province near modern-day Shanghai.

These balls are made up of minced pork, sometimes mixed with diced water chestnuts, mushrooms and soaked mantou (bao without fillings) to enhance the texture. They’re often deep-fried then braised in a broth or a claypot.

Conclusion: It might be more accurate to name this one based on its cooking method, such as braised lion’s head, and provide some added details on the ingredients.

What about American Chinese dishes?

Chinese-speaking fans of American Chinese food may have noticed that restaurant menus in the US often present different English spellings and pronunciations of dishes that are now widely known by their Chinese names.

It’s crucial to understand that Chinese cuisine is made up of a myriad of regional foods from places that have their own local dialects and cultures.

Many early Chinese dishes exported to foreign lands through migration were localized and romanized according to regional dialects, much like a game of broken telephone, depending on which group of Chinese immigrants first introduced the dish.

This explains the pronunciations of some famous American Chinese dishes like chop suey (which would be pronounced as zasui in Mandarin or zap sui in Cantonese) and chow mein (chao mian in Mandarin or caau meen in Cantonese). These two beloved dishes were most likely romanized from Taishanese, a dialect in the Canton area, where many early American Chinese immigrants came from.

For people who question whether we should standardize the names of these dishes, Yue serves up Peking duck as an example.

“There was this movement to rename the Chinese capital city from Peking to Beijing many years ago,” he says. “That worked, but Peking duck is still Peking duck. As a food item, it’s already been recognized as Peking duck — let’s not mess with that.”

With more Chinese traveling abroad, translation errors can go both ways. For instance, one Mandarin-speaking CNN staffer recalls seeing an amusing mistranslation for “turkey breast” in an airport lounge — in Chinese, the dish was labeled tuerqi rufang (Turkish boobs).

Yue emphasizes that the purpose of a translated menu is simply to appeal to potential diners and make a dish comprehensible.

“Translation does matter to culture, but we shouldn’t have a limited mindset about what culture is. Mistranslation can be just as culturally enriching — if not more so — than a proper translation.”

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