Illustration: Liu Rui

The love life of China's chickens has improved, thanks to a booklet from the Beijing municipal authorities, Enjoy Culinary Delights: A Chinese Menu in English. The booklet, originally published by the Foreign Affairs Office in 2008 and updated in 2011, but which has just caught the attention of the public after a press conference to promote it, suggests "official" names for over a thousand food items. This includes replacing "sexless chicken" (tong zi ji), originally a reference to using immature roosters, with the considerable less intriguing "spring chicken."

Other poetic casualties include "red burned lions' heads" (hongshao shizitou), which have become "braised pork balls in brown sauce." But those of a sensitive disposition will be pleased to see that the old confusion around gan, which in a culinary context always means "dry" but sounds exactly like a much cruder Chinese term, is cleared up. And diners will no longer have to worry that a meat patty may "explode their stomach" (baodu), which might look like a sly reference to the digestive consequences of eating street food, but actually refers to a quick-and-hot cooking method.

Menu translations are often nightmarish, and I can understand why the writers of the booklet often opted for either a literal description of cooking techniques, or a simple transliteration of the food's name into English. Chinese dishes are often named in oblique reference to stories that you have to be an insider to know. Look at "Buddha jumps over the wall" (fo tiao qiang) on a menu, and it'd take a remarkable leap of intuition to realize it refers to a shark's-fin soup so delicious it legendarily had even Buddhist monks abandoning their vegetarian vows and scrambling out of the monastery for a taste.

Yet occasionally the writers seem to have punted the translation rather than go for an intriguing halfway ground. Take mapo doufu, a dish often rendered as "tofu made by woman with freckles." This is a reference to its invention by an unfortunately ugly but talented local chef, and "pockmarked" would be better than "freckled," since her face was scarred, not sunburnt. The whole story might be too much to expect people to know, but the choice of "Mapo doufu" in the booklet, rather than the simple, evocative, and literal "Grandma Ma's Tofu" is odd.

But the booklet has brought up more serious questions. Should foreigners in China, whether casual tourists or long-stay residents, have their linguistic needs pandered to? After all, there's no explanatory notes for Chinese tourists in British restaurants that "toad in the hole" is in fact sausages in batter, not the delicious frogs they might be expecting, or that "spotted dick" is a pudding, not a venereal disease.

Or should China be trying to infiltrate its own words into the common currency of global cuisine? The booklet, for instance, suggests jiaozi be rendered as "jiaozi," rather than dumplings, apparently hoping it will come to be a regular English term. Some netizens complained that the failure to use original Chinese terms showed a lack of respect from foreigners. Others pointed out that prevalent Chinglish invites mockery.

Certainly most European languages have managed to get their own terms accepted as the standard. Take Italian pasta, where English-language diners enjoy vermicelli, rather than "little worms," farfalle, rather than "butterflies," and strozzapetti, not "priest-stranglers." And one orders spaghetti puttanesca, not "whore's style spaghetti." So there's a case to be made that using the original terms shows a certain degree of linguistic respect.

But Chinese has already managed this with tofu, Kung Pao Chicken, wonton, and chow mein. These might only be a fraction of the whole of Chinese cuisine, but that's more a testament to its vast range than to linguistic disrespect. People on both sides of the linguistic divide should enjoy the quirky names created by translation, not get fret up about it.

The booklet's writers deserve praise for wading into these murky waters.

But it's only one step in a process of compromise and invention. As the Sinosphere and the Anglosphere come into even-closer contact with each other, the linguistic and cultural blending will throw up many amusing oddities. Yet these quirks are just part of a process that may eventually make jiaozi and roubing as familiar in English as pisa (pizza) and hanbao (hamburgers) are in Chinese.

The author is an editor with the Global Times. jamespalmer@globaltimes.com.cn