Lost in Translation

We need a bit of a chuckle, so I thought I would share this anecdote.

For some reason, holiday ideas and events fell into my lap when I came to work at the game company. I didn’t mind and found it pretty fun. It is one of the best things I have enjoyed about working here. The first holiday that came up after I started last year was Thanksgiving. So I said “well, we have to have an evil turkey boss.” They said “sure thing.” So Thanksgiving comes online and the turkey boss looks like the featured image.

This is actually a monster we already have in the game called a “fire chick;” the “Turkey Boss” ended up being a fire chick, only about 3 times bigger. I groaned and there wasn’t time to change it so we just went along with our fire chick turkey boss and I made loud complaints this year to make sure the turkey boss looked like a turkey this year.  At the time, I figured that the developers were just being lazy and said “looks close enough to a turkey to me, just toss that in the game. No one will know the difference.”
I had a few American and Chinese friends over for a turkey dinner this year and we were talking about turkeys. I asked how to say “turkey” in Chinese. The answer is 火鸡, pronounced huoji. The literal translation is “fire chicken.” So it turns out I did, in fact, get exactly what I asked for.