But the novelty of a list of foods given the literal translation treatment never wears thin. I still find myself laughing at the Cambodian menu at the Teo Hotel in Battambang, Cambodia (pictured) that offered the cryptic but peace-shattering "Dove on Fire (one)".

I discovered that this week that the Beijing Municipal Government's Foreign Affairs Office and the Beijing Tourism Bureau have conspired to take the fun out of ordering Chinese food just in time for the Beijing Olympics by publishing a standardized list of menu items (Word document, 2.6mb) that it has distributed to three-star and above hotels around Beijing. The list is not prescriptive but suggestive.

The 180-page list takes in Chinese and Western cuisines, cocktails, wines and spirits both local and foreign. American hot dogs, Lyonnaise potatoes and Grilled Norwegian Salmon Fillet all make the cut, as does some out-of-place haute cuisine - "Quick-Baked Scallop Mille Feuille (Roast Pepper Sauce and Basil Oil Infusion) (千层酥烤鲜贝)" and the occasional brand name -"Banrock Station Sparkling Shiraz (莎瑞斯发泡葡萄酒)", which renders through Google Translate as "Shiraz Foam Wine".

The real damage is dealt to Chinese food.

Chinese menus are full of puns, cultural and regional in-jokes that you're not supposed to even loosely fathom until you've got a good grip upon whichever dialect that you speak. Even then, I get the feeling that they're not supposed to make a huge amount of sense, but nor do they need to when the same dishes have been served for hundreds of years. The only English equivalent of the more untranslatable Chinese foods that comes to mind is Spotted Dick: great for making a quick, pudding-related appendage joke, dead boring to explain the lengthy and nonsensical etymology.

The list presupposes (probably, correctly) that non-Chinese readers don't want to learn the similarities between dishes nor can they discern them. "Drooling" Chicken (口水鸡), made mouth-watering with the spicy and piquant Sichuan mala sauce becomes the more pedestrian "Chicken with Chili Sauce", other dishes with the same Mala sauce simply become "Spicy" as in the "Spicy Ox Tripe"(麻辣牛肚).

Parts of the list are just as misleading as an original culturally-specific menu item. Pork floss for example, the fluffy dried meat concoction that looks like someone attempted to make fairy floss with jerky alone, gets translated as "minced pork".

Some dialects make the cut (e.g. "wonton" from Cantonese), others don't and there is no consistency with adding regional styles. Su-Zhou, Kejia, and Wuxi regions all make it past the translators as having their own style, even though these boroughs would only be familiar to the most committed Chinese food aficionados. Most dishes end up being reduced from whatever their original name to the Western expectation of meat-centric stir fries.

But if you make it through until page 78, you'll be richly rewarded with "Assorted Meat and Vegetables Cooked in Embers (lured by its delicious taste even the Buddha jumped over the wall)."

I'm sure that it's full of lungs.

Worst translation you've ever seen? Post away. Need inspiration? Try the Flickr Bad Menus pool.