"Ten Dog's Penis Soup"

Menu mistranslation is the oldest joke in the image archive, and it is nearly always the same mechanism rather than carelessness. A dish name in Chinese is a compound of ingredient, method and sometimes a poetic figure; a dictionary lookup word by word produces something literal and occasionally alarming, and a machine translation of an already literal gloss makes it worse.

The pictures that circulated were rarely faked. Restaurants printing bilingual menus had no reason to check English copy with a native speaker, and the phrasing survived reprint after reprint. What changed the genre was not better dictionaries but photographs: once a menu could be photographed and posted the same evening, the awkward line stopped being a local curiosity. Entries like this one are kept as a record of that period of translation rather than as a joke at anyone's expense.