茶碗蒸しChawanmushi: "Tea Cup Steam"

Now, I want to introduce to you guys Chawanmushi(茶碗蒸し), which is a Japanese egg custard dish that placed inisde a tea-like container. Click here if you want to find out more information about the dish.

The Rilakkuma teacups are really cute, right? But that is not my main point XD
What I want to do is draw your attentions to the ingredients of the dish.
According to the video, the dish is made of ingredients which have unique Japanese names, such as Shimejiシメジ, Kamaboko蒲鉾 and Mirin味醂. All these add values to the uniqueness of the dish that it becomes a truly Japanese dish. I would like to try this dish, which is an important part of Japanese food culture, if I have chance.
What do you think about the dish?

Homemade Time!

Do you know, last week is my grandma's birthday!!! In the previous years, I didn't have time to prepare for her birthday party due to my busy work but this year, I decided to give her something special. Since my grandma is a vegetarian so after searching on the Net, I decided to make a vegetarian pizza for her birthday present. I found this video on Youtube. Although it is in Hindi, it has very clear English subtitles so I feel comfortable following the steps.

 

My grandma always tells me that she loves pizza but she always cannot enjoy it as most of the pizzas contain meat. Therefore when she saw the homemade pizza last week, I could see how delighted and touched she was!!! I wish I can treasure my time being with her and I think we all should cherish everything around us. You never know what will happen next minute. So, if you get spare time, why not make some snacks for your friends and family to show your love? Any interest on marble cakes? Haha...I love it very much! How about you? :)

 

Not Delicious Enough?

If you are not hungry enough after reading our blog, why don't you visit the blogs made by our classmates for more mouth-watering experience?





Chinese food is highly regarded and you can find Chinese restaurants all over the world. But what about the traditional food? Check out Bilingualgipsy's blog to know more!






You may know a lot about food from popular cities like Shanghai and Beijing. Do you know what Taiwanese eat? Look at Clevhne's blog to encourage yourself to visit Taiwan! What about Chaozhou? No fear! They also have a post about Chaozhou cuisine. Looking for something spicy? Click the picture below!


How can we introduce so many varieties of food without mentioning the one we are most familiar with? Ever heard of Cha Chan Tang?Find out how those terms are translated in Virtual Pop Cults!



Finally we would like to thank our classmates for introducing these tasty food to everyone. Even we are feeling hungry this time.

Oyakodon: Rice of "Parent and child"(?)

Do you know what is oyakodon（親子丼）? It is a kind of Japanese rice bowl dish. Why would it have such name as "Parent and child" (direct translation from the name 親子丼)? In fact, the dish contains chicken (parent) and eggs (child) as ingredients. Thus, the name OYAKODON borns!!!!! Just click here if you want to know more about the dish. I have also found an interesting video about how to make the dish. It is really in a Japanese style since it involves such elements as moe(萌え)and maid (メイド) into the video. It is just like watching a short story when you see there is interactions between the maid and the master (but believe me, this is not the main point of the post) . Although not all persons like Japanese culture (but I like it indeed), I still hope there would be someone who watch this video and find out the ways in making the dish. It would be FUN!!! (You need not worry about any difficulties in watching the video since there are ENGLISH SUBTITLES!!)

 

What do you think about the dish? Feel free to leave any comments!!

Language for Advertising Food

Having learnt how to translate advertisements, I think it would be a perfect opportunity to analyze how delicious advertisements are translated to attract non-Chinese users in Hong Kong. To start with, let us look at one of the most familiar restaurants:

Chinese Version / English Version



The Chinese slogan is "愛の限定" while the English is "Enjoy love while it lasts". Something is off...


Chinese can often be analyzed word-by-word as a first step in understanding. 愛 is "love" while
限定 is "limited". "の" is not exactly Chinese and is best described as the genitive ('s in English).

Considering the fact that this burger is limited by its promotion period, the limit is obviously an limit of time. What is love? We can ask Shakespeare and look at his sonnets, but his answer won't be useful here. The answer is simple actually. What is limited by time as we are told in the advertisement? The burger.

So we now know that the Chinese slogan focuses on how the love is limited by time and you better hurry before it is gone, what about the English slogan? Seems to have the same message.

I got more to talk, but it would be great if you guys can make use of what you have learnt in class and apply them on this advertisement. Here are some questions we would like to ask, feel free to leave your responses via comment:

1) What type of bilingualism is demonstrated in the Chinese slogan? (For students taking Bilingual Cyber Culture, you must have read that)

2) Can you use the idea of signifier and signified from semiotics to explain the love in advertisement? (For students taking Translation of Texts in Popular Culture, can you still remember signifier and signified?)

3) Do you think the slogan was translated well to replicate the discourse of source text/attract potential customers?

4) Can you think of an English translation that is more localized (closer to the Western culture)?

Subway® Sandwiches

I recently ordered online a delicious 6-inch sandwich filled with roasted chicken, lettuce, tomato, onion, pickles and with spicy barbecue sauce from my favorite sandwich franchise of all time – Subway®. While I was in the process of ordering, I couldn't help but notice that almost every country had their own website for ordering sandwiches from Subway®. Moreover, most of these websites were in the countries' national languages. These included languages from around the world, including French, German, Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish etc. This is a type of commercial bilingualism where bilingualism is used to sell goods or services. In this case, the Subway® franchise provided almost each country with a website in its national language since it will be easier for their consumers to read and understand the language and they will be more likely to attract consumers.
Check out the international website for Subway® right here! Just click on the drop-down menu on the left side of the page where it says "International Sites" and chose your country. They have an option for Hong Kong as well so make your choice of sub and order away! 

Fusion Cuisine 融合菜.

Well, I'm not sure whether fusion cuisine is related to bilingual stuff or not but I think it is a quite interesting, hit topic in the modern Hong Kong. Few days before, I found an old news article about fusion cuisine: http://paper.wenweipo.com/2011/05/28/FC1105280007.htm. Although I can only find the Chinese version, I'll try to describe this fusion culture here and let you know more about this awesome stuff.

Recently, we always hear of the word ‘fusion’ but actually what is fusion food? It is simply a general term for the combination of various forms of cookery and comes in several forms. For example, we can find that there are more and more different types of mooncakes during Mid-Autumn Festival. Besides traditional mooncakes with only egg york and lotus seed paste, there are ice-skin mooncakes with ice-cream or chocolate or different fruits’ favors. These strange combinations usually grab the awareness of public.

If you think that Fusion Cuisine rises only these few years, then you are wrong. Actually we can also see fusion food in cha chaan teng such as egg tart and Yuanyang. Egg tart is created from afternoon tea of UK while Yuanyang is mixture of Hong Kong-style milk tea and coffee. Both of these illustrate that globalization affects Hong Kong very much. There are some reasons for arise of Fusion Cuisine. First, there are more and more immigrants from Mainland or minority groups come to Hong Kong and they always bring recipes of their home to Hong Kong. Moreover, foreign culture is more accepted by Chinese these few years and the cooking from western countries match with the taste of the new generation in Hong Kong.

From the above, I believe you all will agree that Fusion Cuisine is actually a deepgoing topic to discuss. So, after all, maybe we can list out more delicious fusion food in Hong Kong for us to try. Any tasty suggestions? :)