Edible Boletus Soup
Monday, 20 July 2009 -- 6:00 pmBeijEnglish – Special Norway Edition!
It’s not often that I see amusing English translations around here, since Norwegians seem to speak better English than I do!
However, I have been notice a few oddities around our canteen lately. Usually it’s just little things that are a bit off, and even when they’re fairly bizarre, you can still get the idea of what the dish is supposed to be. Today required a bit more effort:
Today’s Soup: Steinsoppsuppe, translated “edible boletus soup.”
First of all, the fact that anything in the canteen needs to be explicitly described as edible is highly amusing!
Second, not being a biology major or Latin student, I was a little stumped on boletus. Thanks to my rudimentary grocery-store-survival Norwegian skills, I recognized sopp as mushroom. That knowledge, combined with my olfactory senses, led me to conclude that it was indeed some kind of mushroom soup.
In this case my Norwegian was actually better than my English, because I couldn’t make any sense of “edible boletus soup” (thus underscoring my original statement that Norwegians speak better English than I do). Of course, no one else in the canteen had any idea what boletus meant either!
I was pretty sure this was a literal or dictionary translation of steinsopp gone horribly wrong. And sure enough, according to Merriam-Webster:
boletus - any of a genus (Boletus) of boletes (as a porcini) some of which are poisonous and others edible
There you go. Edible boletus soup. As opposed to poisonous boletus soup.
(I made life easy and just had the 2 asagane.)
July 20th, 2009 at 11:03 pm
Thomas and I went to the gay animals exhibit a while back, when it was still going on at the Natural History Museum in Oslo. The permanent exhibits are only in Norwegian, but the gay animal stuff had translations, and they were horrible! It was actually easier for me to try to figure out the Norwegian, and this was before my Danish was at a very useful level. I was in Oslo for an interview, and I thought if I got the job, maybe I should volunteer to fix translations for the museum.
At the maritime museum in Helsingør, their translations are mostly quite good, but there’s a reference to a “hermaphrodite brig” that neither Thomas nor I could figure out, even with the Danish text right next to it.
July 24th, 2009 at 10:57 am
This is hilarious! I think you made the right decision to avoid the soup…