Thread:LordLykouleon/@comment-25085701-20181111222948/@comment-25085701-20181115202024

CTheDragons wrote: Slightly off topic My favourite item I saw on local Chinese restaurant which had Bilingual menu. Number 4 menu item seemed to be a little hard to translate. The English version was known as Whatever. Oh dear. Slightly different than 'Have It Your Way...'   Although now I'm thinking about the reverse -- some of our Dennys menus get pretty fanciful with their titles, just to be clever, but none of those things would ever translate well.

The Half a Heart Sandwich was actually Have a Heart Sandwich, which was tuna fish and artichoke hearts. "Evil Jungle Prince"  was a fried rice dish in an pineapple bowl with silly plastic tiki forks stuck in it -- someone was brave and curious enough to order it just to see what it was.

I have a person in my Toastmasters club who related a true story about learning English as a second language, where he tried to do what his cousin told him, and order 'the Mac' from McDonalds, but they wouldn't serve it to him because it was breakfast time.

As far as the 'tech words' go, I think the bigger problem is that sometimes we don't have any other way to explain something to people short of going the long way around to do it. Even here on Habitica we've got some unique meanings attached to things, like 'pomodoros' that requires specific knowledge of a related term, and that Due Dailies are different than To-Dos. Everything in language is 'code' to everyone at first.