The plane’s business class menu, featuring dragon bone soup and dog food appetizers, has generated a lot of reactions on social media and in the media. First, a tourist who was flying on board the Shanghai carrier China Eastern Airlines and decided to have a snack shared his discovery. “What would that mean?” – he asked in public.
As Simple Flying reported, no dragons were harmed during cooking: dragon bone meant pork or chicken bones for traditional corn soup. At the same time, the phrase about imported dog food only suggested that the menu designer had confused some kind of snack with a hot dog and did not understand the nuances of meaning well.
The reason for the amazing metamorphoses is the difficulty of translating from the national language into English, accepted in aviation, and vice versa. The publication recalled a long-forgotten funny incident when Braniff Airlines launched the slogan “Fly Naked.” To promote first class with leather seats in the Mexican market, creatives turned the phrase Fly in Leather into Vuela en cuero in Spanish. It seems to be also about skin but with a different meaning.
The translation of an announcement into French about an emergency landing of a plane led to the panicked state of a tourist from France. At the same time, a minute earlier, passengers were only asked in clear English to take their seats and fasten their seat belts: the liner had entered a turbulence zone.