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In a scheme to get some laundry done for him free of charge, teacher ryan has taken on the task of translating Pi Pen's Thai food menu into English. He's been letting me help here and there, and it turns out it's an excellent way to get familiar with the Thai alphabet. From my few sessions sitting down with the menu and a thai translation/dictionary site I already feel more comfortable picking out and recognizing a lot of those little squiggles they have written everywhere here.
The menu is only 16 lines long but it's a time consuming process to identify each character (the font Pi Pen uses on her menu seems to be a deliberate attempt to make the characters undecipherable) and then fiddle with different character/word combinations to finally come up with some kind of vague, incomplete translation of some of the words...
Ryan been more dedicated to the project, and has had much more success than I. He's translated menu items like "fried rice with chicken/pork/shrimp," "spicy prawn soup with or without coconut milk" and "pork sausage with rice and a fried egg." Here are some of the menu items i've translated so far:
- eyebrows in fish sauce
- larvae poured over stringy peasant
- crude oil unboiled water yarn on floppy disk
- earthenware pig having not yet entered monkhood
and my favorite,
- stir fried children with hemorrhagic fever
I've given up. I suspect he's having more luck without my help.
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Actually the crude oil unboiled water yarn on floppy disk is a real menu item. I made the mistake of ordering it yesterday. The oil did taste like it had been refined, though. And she's since upgraded to CD-ROMs (come on, nobody eats FLOPPYs with their unboiled yarn these days).
ReplyDelete"larvae poured over stringy peasant"... can be excellent if prepared correctly.
ReplyDeletemummy and i are sitting in the hallway upstairs attempting to put away christmas stuff and we have tears rolling down our faces as we read this :)
ReplyDeletewell i'm glad my translation attempts can be, if not successful, at least humorous for you guys...
ReplyDelete