Korea to fix mistranslations on English menu

By Yun Suh-young

Imagine a customer enters a restaurant, opens a menu and finds herself facing words such as "bear tang," "six times," and "dynamic stew." What would she choose to order?

The latter would be the choice for this reporter, as it sounds most decent and may in fact offer a "dynamic" experience.

But the above terms are not some funny words thrown out there to make a joke. They are actual names of dishes written in some of the English menus of Korean restaurants in Seoul. The Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) revealed examples of mistranslated dish names such as "six times" for beef tartare or "yukhoe," "bear tang" for beef bone soup (gomtang), "chicken asshole house" for stir-fried chicken gizzards, "lifestyle meat" for raw meat, "dynamic stew" for pollack stew, to name a few.

The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism announced Wednesday it would correct the mistranslated menus causing confusion to foreign tourists together with the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs, the National Institute of Korean Language, the Korean Food Foundation, and the KTO.

As pitiful as it sounds, such mistranslated menus are prevalent across the country, let alone the capital. Much is attributed to poor translation tools that non-English speaking restaurant owners use to write the Korean names of dishes in English. Automatic online translation services are one of them, and when the experimental journalist typed in the names of several Korean dishes into the translator, one out of five was mistranslated while the other four were admissible, but not accurate.

For instance, "gomtang," which is a stew boiled with beef bones and other parts of a cow, is translated as "oxtail soup," which is not entirely wrong because many times tail bones are used, but not accurate to describe the dish in general. The most farfetched translation for this dish, spotted in a menu, was "bear tang" which is a literal translation of the word "gom" which means "bear" in Korean. The accurate translation for this dish would be beef bone soup, according to the KTO.

Another example of a wrong translation is of "yukhoe," beef tartare, which was translated as "six times" which is another literal translation of the Korean word. "Yuk" means "six" in Korean and "hoe" means "number of times." In the online translation service, the word was "raw meat" which was correct, but not appropriate to describe the dish.

Then there was the "dynamic stew" which was a mistranslation for "dongtaejiggae" or pollack stew. What was spotted on a menu was actually what the Internet translator offered when typing the word in Korean. The translator literally translated the word "dongtae" into "dynamic" word-for-word. "Dong" means active and "tae" means form or state in Korean, together which means dynamic state or movement.

According to a report submitted by the SoonChunHyang University's Industry Academy Cooperation Foundation to the KTO last year, around 34 percent of the 192 Korean restaurants surveyed had at least one or more serious mistranslations on their menus.

"This is not unique to Korea. English is the world language now. If you go to any country, you'll come across funny, amusing or rude translations of food," said Andrew Salmon, columnist and author, who is a long time resident of Korea.

"In a country that is as wired as Korea, it is very easy to overcome this problem. All you need is the government to approve a list of food translations and post it on an official government website and every restaurateur can consult that website and suddenly you've standardized all your spelling overnight. Easy."

The KTO plans to launch a separate website for searching for standardized terms because its current service within its own website is difficult to access. It also plans to collaborate with search engine Naver to offer standardized translations for dish names in English, Japanese and Chinese when entering them in Korean.

However, while the attempt may be noteworthy, what foreigners living in Korea are doubtful of is whether such attempts will succeed in changing the situation or end as a one-time event.

Salmon said he edited a booklet for the government listing English names for Korean menus about 7 or 8 years ago, in Hangeul, Romanized Hangeul and English. It had descriptions of hundreds of different dishes, "designed to be a one-stop shop for any restaurant or shop, food company which needed to have its dishes' names in English," he said.

"My wife and I edited it. But I'm astonished that it's never been fully or widely disseminated," said Salmon.

"I see these things happening again and again. The problem is, various organizations don't talk to each other, don't cooperate with each other. Government organizations should communicate and collaborate instead of compete with each other."

"Although I understand the government's desire to standardize the names of Korean dishes in different languages, this wouldn't be the first time a government organization has tried to do so, which means previous efforts have fallen short of the intended goal," said Todd Sample, President of Wine on Wednesday Korea, who is a 20-year resident in Korea.

"Will Korean restaurants suddenly add the corrected names to their menus? Realistically, it is highly unlikely. That said, the initiative shows the unrelenting push by the Korean government to bring greater awareness to Korean food, so if the organizations involved get it right, at least their efforts should be applauded," said Sample.