The Temple Explodes the Chicken Cubes

Few days ago, when I was browsing through wikipedia, I bumped into the article on Chinglish, and found this amusing photo:

I laughed, literally, until my stomach hurts.

First I thought maybe someone used photo editing software to create the whole thing, but later, I used Google to search for the phrase “the temple explodes the chicken cubes”, I found other similar photos, including this one posted on zachfine.com:

My guess is this must be a machine translation job. I experimented with BabelFish to translate the menu item宮爆雞塊 (gōngbào jīkuài) into English; the result is “the palace explodes the chicken nugget”.

宮爆雞塊 has nothing to do with sacerdotal or imperial explosion, it is a classical Sichuan cuisine commonly known as Kung Pao chicken (宮保雞塊gōngbǎo jīkuài or宮保雞丁gōngbǎo jīdīng ). The name of the dish derived from the official title of its creator, 宮保 “palace guardian”. Later, the name changed to 宮爆, literally “palace stir-fried”.

But how is it possible to produce such translation?

Each Chinese character usually represents a morpheme. The problem is sometimes the bound-free status of Chinese morphemes is rather flexible, and polysemy is not uncommon in Chinese. Depends on the contexts, the same lexical item might belong to different lexical categories.

Computer cannot distinguish differences of these elements; this is why although the name of this dish is a noun phrase, the translation done by machine is a hilarious verb phrase. The second character 爆 in the name of the dish has different meanings: “stir-fried”, “to burst”, “to explode”. “The temple explodes the chicken cubes” or “the palace explodes the chicken nuggets” is naturally what you will get from a word-by-word machine translation.

This reminds me of an article appeared on BBC website not so long ago. According to this article, researchers at Carnegie Mellon University had developed a kind of translation device, which they claimed able to achieve 80% accuracy within a small vocabulary of about 100-200 words. However, they also admit that “a full vocabulary had a much lower level of accuracy”.

Machine translation can never replace human translation. Language is not just words; it also represents the world and the culture of its speakers. Computer, no matter how advance, cannot comprehend it.

More Chinglish menus (warning: hysterically hilarious):

http://www.rahoi.com/2006/03/may-i-take-your-order.php (Chinglish in its full glory. I laughed so hard that I cried. This is one of the funniest things I had ever read in my entire life. )

http://www.kurtlow.com/?p=262