In the Canary Islands, menu translations from Spanish to English can be very helpful – or very funny.
One of the many joys of the Canary Islands is that they have been the holiday haunt of the British for so long that you can depend on 95% of the islands’ menus being in English, as well as Spanish. My menu Spanish is pretty good, so I use these second pages as dictionaries to decipher the words or ingredients that I don’t recognize.
Sometimes. Other times they are thoroughly un-useful, translating dishes such as Pollo Romano as “chicken Roman style” – not very helpful. But we like them best when they contain the sort of mistranslation that comes of using a dictionary to look up individual words.
This creates some amusing descriptions. A boned filet of fish, for example hit the English menu as “spineless fish.” No gumption whatever, that fish. Less appetizing was the translation of beef en brochette as “beef with spit.” Occasionally the errors are simple ones of spelling, such as the heart-rending notion of “filet of soul.”
Other translations are just simply honest. My favorite in that category defined Café Americano as “weak coffee.” How true.
