Pija

For reasons that aren't worth going into in detail, the other day Erma and I were proof-reading an English translation of a set of Korean recipes. They had been translated by a Korean speaker, and needed a fair amount of work. Since we ended up working into the evening, a pizza was ordered for us.

This is what came:


The pizza itself was not very unusual. We asked for a Korean-type topping. I think we may have gotten bulgogi. But it really seemed normal: green pepper, onion, mushroom, and little cubes of meat. What was different was the crust: it was essentially a big flat croissant -- many flaky, buttery layers.

And it came with pickles.

What really caught our eye was the box. See how it says "Love for women" on it? What does that mean?


And take a look at this packet. It says "made for women" in the upper-left corner. Was it okay for me to eat this extremely feminine pizza? Was there a separate line of "made for men" pizza? Is this part of a massive campaign to try to convince pizza-hating Korean women to eat more pizza?


This was one of three packets that came. The other two contained hot sauce and grated parmesan cheese.

The packet pictured here was interesting for a couple of reasons. It contained a garlic-flavored mayonnaise-like sauce, meant for dipping pizza in. But it is not labeled with the Korean word for garlic. It says Gallik Dipping Soseu. I'm not sure how intelligible "gallik" is to the average Korean, but there is a picture of garlic on the packet, and also instructions for use in the lower-left corner.

We also found the word soseu 소스 "sauce" on the packet amusing, for a reason that requires some explanation.

If you look up soseu in a Korean-English dictionary, you will find two separate entries, with two different definitions: "sauce" and "source". Both, of course, are borrowings from English, and generally English "r"s that come after vowels and before consonants are ignored in Korean pronunciation.

We'd just spent a while proof-reading those recipes. Early on I encountered this paragraph:


I thought the use of "source" -- as in "food source" -- there seemed wrong, so I corrected it to "ingredients". Then Erma and I saw this section:


And we realized that every single instance of Korean soseu in the original had been mis-translated as "source" instead of "sauce" in English.

The results were sometimes quite humorous.