Translation and Food - Chinglish?

If you are taking TRA209/3209, engrish.com should not be new to you. If you aren't, don't worry, you can keep reading without any problem.

While most entries on engrish.com are funny and ungrammatical English, this one is not exactly the same as others. If you can read the source text, you can tell that it is a fairly literal translation and the product is grammatically correct. Yet, it is personally picked by the English speakers from engrish.com to be featured. Why? Let's find out what is 功夫牛排 first.

功夫牛排 consists of four Chinese characters, which form two nouns, with the first one 功夫 (Kung Fu) being the modifier for the second one 牛排 (steak). That doesn't help understanding why they have to call them Kung Fu steak when those cows (or steaks) cannot (and could not) do Chinese Kung Fu.

According to a restaurant offering this dish:

[經典功夫牛排]煎製牛排有很多講究，既要能夠將牛肉表面迅速加熱，產生大量的香料分子，又不能使它們的細胞壁破裂，這樣，更多的香氣就會在客人口中爆裂。這就需要廚師的經驗和功夫了。

The most important part is in bold and underlined. It means "the cook must be experienced and skilled". If you cannot read Chinese, you must be wondering where the Kung Fu went. In this brief translation, I have used experienced for 經驗 and skilled for 功夫, which is a word with multiple meanings based on the context in Chinese.

Judging from the information we have so far, it looks like the translator is to be blamed. However, is that really the case? Today in the lecture of TRA209/3209 we learn that there is liberty in translating advertisements to make them attractive and easy to remember. While this is not actually an advertisement, translators in this scenario are at least expected to make it appealing, not puzzling, for the audience.

Is it really the translator's fault for turning this into a joke? Can you think of a better translation to introduce this dish to non-Chinese? Let us know what you think by posting comments here!