Google Makes Cooking Dapanji Easy

Technology is moving fast, faster than I’m learning Chinese, and this is useful

I just saw forum topic asking “How Do I Make Da Pan Ji”. Da Pan Ji is a traditionally Xinjiang dish, slightly spicy, consisting large pieces of Chicken lightly fried with spices then stewed with potatos, carrots, tomatos and peppers, often served with thick flat noodles – the noodles soaking up the rich sauce.

Whilst ignorant as to how it’s made I've been impressed by the dish ever since tasting it at my local Dalian Da Pan Ji vendor located in the dormitory area of Dalian Finance and Economics University.  Knowing exactly how to make it would be interesting.

This is where technology comes in handy.

Two really important tools: Google Translate and Google’s Chinese IME.

• Chinese-English translation using Google Translate has made leaps and bounds over the past couple of years to the state, barring anything technical, legal or extremely specific or literary, it makes a reasonably understandable nuts-and-bolts tool.
• A good Chinese IME. An IME allows input of Chinese (or Japanese, etc) characters via a normal keyboard.  There are plenty of decent IMEs around, one of the best is Google’s (linked above), also highly praised is Sohu’s (which Google got into a bit of trouble having initially copied).

How to translate and find practically anything on the Chinese language web:

1. As long as a phrase is sufficiently long or specific, practically no knowledge of Chinese characters is necessary to write it as long as the Pinyin is known.  In the DaPanJi example, ‘Da’ may have a multitude of meanings (e.g. 大笪打达, as may ‘Pan’ 盘潘判攀).  Logically, combinations of characters are rarer than individual instances of characters, therefore while typing Da and Pan seperately may result in much confusion, typing 'DaPan' (no space) gives a much smaller set of results infact 大盘 is the only common combination of the sounds 'Da' and 'Pan'.  Even if there were a few 'DaPan's, typing 'DaPanJi' would result in a pretty small results set*.
2. Going to Google.cn I typed in DaPanJi (no spaces, remember) and got a single combination 大盘鸡 and a load of search results - if you don't read Chinese this remains useless. Enter Google Translate.
3. I took the URL of the search results (http://www.google.com/search?q=%E5%A4%A7%E7%9B%98%E9%B8%A1&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a), stuck it in Google translate and got the results back in English. The top few posts were all recipes, score!
4. When browsing the recipe I did so in parallel with the Chinese version of the web page so I could print the spices in Chinese characters and could take them to the shop for a shop assistant to help pick-out – possible with even the most basic body language.
5. I also browsed some other pages to see if they suggested anything different.

Don’t know Chinese? With a little technology it’s not necessary to attain a high level of ability to be able to do some seemingly complex things and make life here easier until your Chinese level improves. I feel we're only at the cusp of automated translation, it is not hard to image, perhaps just a few years away, speech and video-recognition software plugging a microphone or camera providing on-the-spot translation and playback, an interesting prospect culturally as much as practically.

*Milage varies for company or road names, often Pronouns take parts of different words and mix them together into something less common and more unique - harder for an IME to guess.

Image:  http://flickr.com/photos/andzhy/215593936/ Creative Commons Licence by-nc-sa-2.0