The Buffalo Fish
Posted on November 1, 2009 at 10:39 pm by kyliu
Tags: america, chinese, culture, lost-in-translation
Filed Under seen | 2 Comments |
Another trip to the local “Asian” grocery store (this time, Vietnamese), and another surprise.
There were a large number of different types of “bufforlo fish” of all kinds being advertised in the store. Ignoring the misspelling for now, what I don’t understand is how do you get from 鲩鱼, which is a fish only found in China, to the “buffalo fish,” something only found in the Southern U.S.A.
鲩鱼, which in English is known as “grass carp,” is a very popular Chinese food fish (Ctenopharyngodon idella). The buffalo fish, on the other hand, is a completely different genus of fish (the Ictiobus). Wikipedia claims that the buffalo fish is sometimes mistaken for “carp.” So I suppose it’s possible that the Chinese living abroad might refer to the buffalo fish as a kind of “grass carp,” thus 鲩鱼.
(Lisa has advanced an alternate theory, based on the large number of English-language Chinese fish recipes she has found on line that refer to “buffalo fish.” She thinks that the Chinese living abroad may have taken over the English meaning for “buffalo fish” by referring to the real Chinese 鲩鱼 (the grass carp) as “buffalo fish” in English.)
But what in the world is a “Chinese buffalo” fish? If the buffalo fish is mistaken as an American version of the grass carp, then a “Chinese buffalo” ought to be the real grass carp, and thus a 鲩鱼, right? (This is like how you use Google Translate to translate something in Chinese into English and back into Chinese again, and you should be getting the original back.)
But that’s not what the Chinese sign says. 唐山鲩 literally means “the grass carp of Tangshan,” and Tangshan is a city in Hebei Province, near Beijing. The string “唐山鲩” literally does not exist on Google, so what in the world is this fish?
Translations of names of food animals and plants between Chinese and English seem to me often incredibly imprecise and haphazard. This is just the latest example.
(I know what you are going to say. You are going to ask why didn’t I just look at the darned fish and see what kind of fish is it? Was it a grass carp or not?
Well, there are two reasons why I couldn’t do that. One, the tank for “Chinese bufforlo” was empty. Two, even if it weren’t, I wouldn’t have been able to identify anything. My ability to identify fish is limited to using my mouth, and I have only two categories: “delicious” and “not delicious.” So, it wouldn’t have been any use had I seen the fish. Lisa is the one who would have been able to do something useful with a visual examination.)
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is there any other proof or translation that i can get. U.S. wildlife fisheries says that there is no such fish but my chinese market in N.Y. wants to use that name to describe amur or grass carp. please help.
I’m sorry to hear that. I don’t know really what’s an appropriate English translation. Can you give the Latin name?