Here's one for the language geeks.

(If you are confused by the title and wonder what chicken has to do with translation, please read the earlier post, Chicken Translation Gems.)

Somewhere among the boxes of  old photos and mementos stored away in my friend Meg's house in Seattle, I have a clipping from the "Blue Pages" - the latin-character counterpart to the Yellow Pages in the Athens telephone directory. It announces:

LOXANDRA'S COOCKS FOR YOU
We have opened a grotesque taverna by the sea shor in
Kalamaki. Try her stuffed papers, her stuffed wine leaves,
her stuffed cheese sticks, her humburger and more.
WE LOVE YOU TASTE!

Snickering at restaurant menus in foreign countries is almost unfair, it feels just a little too easy. But there's something about opening a menu and seeing an item like "rise balls wrapped" (stuffed grape leaves) or "horse bean smash" (fava, a puree of broad beans) makes you glad that there will always be people with fractured English in the restaurant industry. I used to offer to retranslate the menus ("will translate for food?") but now my attitude is, "let them offer a complimentary meal to one of the three billion tourists that come through every day in exchange for a check of their menu. If they don't care, then it's fair game!" 

Back in the 1980s, menus in Greece were a source of infinite merriment, and when I went to a new place, I could hardly wait to see what delicacies were on offer. In 1982, the Ideal Restaurant in Athens tempted visitors with "Bowels in Spit." That one was sure to be a draw for Ma and Pa Polyester from Tunkerville, Iowa. In Greek, "on," "in" and "at" are the same word. How was the hapless employee charged with translating the menu to know that the two different words for intestines in English have very different meanings, or that "spit" means both something you roast food "on," as well as saliva? The dish is kokoretsi/kokoreç, intestines wrapped around offal and grilled over hot coals. Maybe still not everyone's cup of tea but preferable to saliva-braised bowels any day.

When I went back in 2000, the streetside menu of Ideal was one of my first stops, and I was not disappointed. Top on the menu was "Chicken in Pyrex" and "Unadorned Spaghetti." And after your meal, why not relax in one of Athens' quaint sidewalk cafes, and try their Soda Divers, a Gin Fizt or a Blundy Mary?

Turkey (as the previous post makes clear) was even more fertile ground, and when on my first walk down Millet Caddesi, I saw a sign proclaiming:

The majesty view, the sea taras, wide fan, prices in tune

I knew I'd hit a jackpot. Like the "Bowels in Spit," item above, you almost have to know Turkish to figure out exactly what they are trying to say. This has become a fun game in itself; sometimes the items are so odd that figuring out the thought processes behind them require some real thought in itself. The majesty view and sea taras are clear enough, but what about the wide fan? In Turkish the term "genis yelpaze," or "wide fan" means a "broad range." As for "Prices in tune," the word "düzenli" means "in order" as well as "in tune," so what they are telling us is that the prices are appropriate to what you are getting, i.e. it's not a ripoff joint.

One of the first little restaurants I went into here had "oily grin beans" and that old favorite, "peppers stuffed with oil." Green beans with olive oil (the "with" in Turkish is an ending, so it's only natural to look for the direct construction in English). The second is stuffed peppers with olive oil.

Even today you can find a sign inviting you to dine at an "Alcoholic Restaurant" in Sultanahmet. My kinda place!

Sometimes - if it's a place I frequent and the people there are just too kind and earnest to giggle at, I do offer to translate a menu. One was for Sütis on Istiklal Caddesi in Istanbul. Their menu proclaimed:

Sütis

Unchangeable Taste of Istanbul...

We Have Home Services...
(For The Ones You Love...)

On the menu were such rare treats as:

FOODS KINDS
Sorfitor
Kinds of Flat Breads
Egg Products

DESSERTS
Kettle Bottom (Slinghtly Burned)
Starch Water
Folded Sweet Syrup
Sweat Meat of Large Layer
Milky Pudding with Thoraxic of Hen
Special Turkish Sweat Pastry

"Sweat Meat of Large Layer" really didn't sound very appetising; I mean whose sweat is it? And "Milky Pudding with Thoraxic of Hen" only slightly more so,  So the sweat meat became Ekmek Kadayif (a spongy thin cake soaked in syrup), and the second item became "Milk pudding with chicken breast." (Yes, it exists and it's delicious.) But still they were unable to leave well enough alone, and the "kettle bottom" still received the byline, "It's specialty being slightly burnt." (It's the abovementioned pudding, with or sans chicken, allowed to brown in a broad pan, cut and scraped off with its browned crust.) "Starch water" is an unsweetened pudding with powdered sugar and rosewater over the top. Folded sweet syrup is baklava.

A fellow language geek who also collects this stuff reminded me of one - "Sensitive meatballs." It's the translation of içli köfte, a "meatball" with a bulgur shell and a meat filling. Why sentisitve? Check out the term içli in the online Turkish English dictionary.

Yesterday I had visitors from out of town and we found some new puzzles to solve:

Okay, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Sousape is Sausage, and "Wing sauce in the oven" is backed chicken wings in sauce. But "Monitoring" is a rare masterpiece that you have to know Turkish to decipher. Gözleme the food (actually a rural pronunciation of "közleme") is a piece of dough rolled out very thin, spread with a meat, cheese or spinach filling, folded over and baked on a griddle over hot coals (köz). But the verb "gözlemek" means "to monitor, observe," and "gözleme" is the act of monitoring. This is what happens when you don't know about cross-referencing!

The next page was a bit more mysterious:

The staft mussel is not a mussel with Staph (well, if it is, it's an extra); it's just stuffed. The "Pickled" is pickled/preserved bonito. I wasn't sure where they came up with "Weedy" for Çiroz, a dry salted mackerel served with olive oil and lemon, but I looked it up in the Sesli Sözlük dictionary and there it was. Sometimes you learn something! (I guess they just gave up on the remaining items.)

The last page turned out to hold a hidden treasure:

"Etesisan" would be a complete mystery if not for the Turkish informing us that it is "seasonal fruit." Perhaps a corruption of "In the season?" But the bald sweet truly had me a stumped for a bit. (I like my desserts free of hair as well, but this is a dessert made from winter squash.) But some memory lingered in my mind, and I called my language geek friend, who reminded me of a Turkish expression for a bald person: "Kabak Kafali" - "Squash Head." Pretty out there, but you have to hand it to them, this one really took some thinking!