Mint sauce / Lamm mit Minzsauce

Lamm mit Minzsauce ja.
Lamm mit Pfefferminzsauce nein.
Lamm mit Pfefferminzsauce einschließlich Pfefferminzlikör kotz spei würg.

The German housewives’ programme ARD-Buffet has a daily lunch recipe, devoted today – so they say – to England, as one of the World Cup contestants. So today’s recipe is lamb with mint sauce. They did also admit that it was a Middle Eastern recipe, but I feel very bad about the way they did not distinguish between mint and peppermint – both were waved around and referred to. And the 10 ml of luminous green peppermint liqueuer made me feel very bad.
What’s more, the Turks understand which is the right mint, and you can get it fresh or dried at Turkish greengrocers’. So do they really use peppermint with lamb in the Middle East?

Of course, it may be a ploy to attack the England team yet again.

bq. 1 Bund Minze
300 ml Lammfond
1 Zwiebel
4 EL Butterschmalz
10 ml Minzlikör
1 EL kalte Butter
1 TL Speisestärke
300 g grüne Bohnen
1 Schalotte
60 ml Gemüsebrühe
300 g Lammrücken
Salz, Pfeffer

14 thoughts on “Mint sauce / Lamm mit Minzsauce

  1. Dunno about the Lebanon, but in Australia one takes the traditional path:

    Mary had a little lamb
    With taties and mint sauce.
    Oh dear, my little lamb, she cried,
    I’m hungry as a horse.

  2. Jutta hatte schon Baggers geraten, bevor ich die deutsche Version entdeckte. Baggers sind in Franken Reibekuchen, Kartoffelpuffer, Reiberdatschi usw. – aber laut “Wie sagt man anderswo?” nur um N

  3. The English is straight, unedited Google translator output. I have tried a few samples and they are all 1:1 reproducable. The “split-somewhere-in-the-middle” translation technique that gives “sand-yielded” from “sandwich” failed when I tried it with one of our local Schw

  4. And why do the salmon smoke? I thought EU law now forbade that sort of thing. In a restaurant, of all places!

  5. “Child shred with pommes…” Now how would you go about shredding a child with poms? And how cruel! They didn’t even do this in Iraq under Saddam!

  6. Derek: an adapted MT program would solve a lot of their problems.
    I see Arrogant.Polyglot has written a post in French so he can post it in MT.

    Victor: and if they’re stuffed full of dye battery-farmed salmon, they really have nothing going for them!

    VolkmarH: Of course they didn’t have enough Poms there in those days. Now they have too many.

  7. Yes, I took a peep at his site. Like many others, he does not make allowances for the service being FREE but I take his point that a large company should know that there is no such thing as a free translation. Have you ever seen a premium MT service offered? I am going to look around for an automatic menu translation service that has to be paid for. I have an old DE-EN machine translation program that cost me DM 2400.00 and I am going to install it on a Win XP

  8. (part 2) … machine and feed it with menu information to see if I can’t do a lot better than Google.

    Incidentally, Arrogant Polyglot’s English does not appear to be all that outstanding either, e.g.

    “Today, during a job perusal session on workopolis.com, I discovered that not only do job seekers not always know what they’re looking for, but neither are employers!”

    Naturally, if he runs that through Google Translator it changes the sense of it – crap in, crap out!

    I detect a little pot calling the kettle black!

  9. Yes, but *different* crap.

    A pot calling the kettle black – don’t we all?

    An adapted MT program has the problem that it still wouldn’t be 100% but it would probably have to cost something. People presumably have no conception of the problems that lurk in menus.
    And it would be easy enough to tell such a program to translate Zwiebel as onion rather than bulb for its first choice – something I would have done anyway. It would get Schnitzel right and it would know some more terms, but possibly not Baggers. It would not translate Gericht as court.

  10. I notice the desserts are entitled “refeed”.
    Didn’t the aristcrats used to work through all items on the menu like that – something about a feather and a little tickle to the throat, I seem to recall.
    But then, this little device may not be necessary, because they seem to add cream to each dish. I suppose this is a modern refinement of an ancient custom.

  11. “Today, during a job perusal session on workopolis.com, I discovered that not only do job seekers not always know what they’re looking for, but neither do employers!”Are you now satisfied Derek?

    To further defend myself, I essentially have few issues with MT. I do, however, feel that MT programs MUST display a type of ‘buyer beware’ informing the user that the translation provided WILL NOT reflect native speech patterns. Unilingual people DO NOT understand the nuances of language-to-language translations. Most assume a word-to-word equivalence. Something must make them aware that this is not the case.

    It was precisely for that reason that I wrote the message in French and used Google to translate it. What better way to get your point accross to the Arrogant Monoglots?

  12. Totally satisfied, thank you, Arrogant! But then I was able to decipher the meaning of your original version, which is what I would dare to claim about the MT English of your French.

    However, I am not quite so clear about your feeling that a FREE service should display a BUYER beware warning. On many US city and county websites, you can see a Google translation feature provided for page after page of city ordinances and accompanied by a disclaimer stating that the translated text might not convey all the legal nuances. Firstly, who reads disclaimers? Secondly, what is the point of providing legal text that is known to be defective even if it is accompanied by a disclaimer? Thirdly, who checks the output of court interpreters to be sure that THEY convey all the legal nuances? Maybe ALL legal texts should be accompanied by a disclaimer about legal nuances, even in the original language?

    The point of my, admittedly not particularly lucid comment, was to suggest that, rather than lambasting FREE machine translation facilities, it might be more of a public service to provide, or even just recommend, a specialized fee-charging machine-translation service which, at the present state of the technology would have to include pre- and post-editing. There are some about but since nobody can detect their output at a glance, critics would have to PAY for a sample to criticize – and that would take all the fun out of it, right?

    I like your blog, by the way – it’s not every day that one meets a fellow arrogant polyglot!

Leave a Reply to Margaret Marks Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.