My husband and I love Chinese food, and so do our children. It is especially yummy after we've been traveling in the car for days and are looking for a healthy alternative for dinner. So, we love to find Chinese restaurants while we are driving, and many times we are amused at their names. While I am neither proficient in Mandarin or Cantonese (although I can say "thank you" and "toilet" in Mandarin) I don't pretend to be, nor would I go to China and open up a restaurant with some Americanized, translated name that didn't quite make sense in their language. So, we have "China Taste". Maybe "Taste of China" would have been better?
And I really don't get this one-- "Good Friend"? Like I'm going to eat my friend or what? Maybe it means I should trust them and their food because they are my "Good Friend"? I don't think so.
Okay, "New Garden" is a little bit better. But I have to think that the opposite would be an old garden, and I don't really want old stuff. I guess the connotation here is fresh veggies, which is a good thing. But I just don't usually associate Chinese food with any garden-- new or old.
And last but not least, "Jade House". This is definitely a little better as jade is indeed associated with China, but the thought of crunching on green rocks doesn't make me too hungry either. This may have come across better if it was in a large nice green building and not a strip center.
And we close with what was supposedly the biggest bungled translation ever. In the 1960's, Pepsi, at the time a faltering product, came up with the slogan, "Come Alive! You're in the Pepsi Generation!". (Check out that phone!) It did wonders for their sales and the ad campaign spread. When Pepsi marketed their product in China, the billboards read "Pepsi brings you back from the dead"*. I suggest using fluent translators when doing anything of this sort. Happy Thursday!
*If you research this you can find it, but it does fall under "undetermined" in the urban rumor category.
