I started to feel hungry. That unfortunately happens nearly every evening. Since I am now working 2 days per week only (yea!) I have to take care of myself alone the other days :..(. This noon I had only a comparably small lunch at a simple Thai place. Not bad…but I had expected a soup and a Pad Thai to fill me, but it was a bit small.

So I decided for German bread (yeah, Marco Polo sells something they really call 德国面包 = déguó miànbāo, which tastes as close to a German bread as you can get here) plus some warm side dish. And searching my fridge I came across a nice buy from Carrefour:

Thurnberger Sausage – 图林根猪肉肠

Yeah, so it says on the package. And I was wondering which famous sausage brand they try to refer to:

1. Thüringer, or

2. Nürnberger

It actually looks more like a combination of both: Thüringer + Nürnberger = Thürnberger.

With my increasing Chinese knowledge and a dictionary with a radical table I could figure out how they put together the name:

图林根 = tú lín gēn = phonetic name translation

猪肉 = zhū ròu = pork meat, the only Chinese part I could understand before buying

肠 = cháng = intestines, well, yeah, Germans probably don’t like to hear it, but that is what sausages are actually made from… 😉

Interlude: Have you ever tried to watch a Chinese fake DVD with English subtitles switched on? (No, I certainly have never bought any one, I don’t own any, and there are none in my appartment, I have only heard of people having heard of someone who…. :)) You would note that the English subtitles on a Chinese fake DVD have nothing to do with the spoken English text. If you in addition have a little Chinese knowedge and switch back and forth between Chinese and English subtitles then you notice that the English subtitles are a rough back-translation of the already bad Chinese subtitles, which probably somebody created who listened to the movie. I still fail to explain why these guys copy the entire movie part of a DVD but fail to just copy the already existing English subtitles, too…but they don’t. It’s handcraft.

Now, what has that to do with German sausages? Look at the phonetic translation, tú lín gēn, and what comes out on the package as ‘English’ translation, Thurnberger. It simply doesn’t match the Chinese phonetic translation. My guess is: Yurun wanted to write about Thüringer sausages.

However…the size is more like a Nürnberger….

Well…this way they probably avoid conflicts on registered trade marks…both “Thüringer” and “Nürnberger” are registered with the EU. Though I failed to figure out in a matter of minutes what that generally and specifically in China actually means 😉

BTW: The package also refers to a web page of Nanjing Yurun, the company responsible for these sausages.

I enjoyed them anyway! Well, not having a grill here I had to fry them in butter in a pan, but better than nothing: They even faintly resembled the taste of German sausages 😉

P.S.: This is what a real Original Thüringer Rostbratwurst has to look like!

P.P.S.: And here’s what the Chinese ones looked like:

Categories: Shanghai

Originally Created: 03/12/2007 01:00:22 PM
Last Edited: 03/12/2007