Of the ones he sent, I liked this one best:
어머니 손맛 is an idiomatic expression meaning "just like homemade." The last part, 청국장, is a type of soup, but it's the kind of thing you won't find in a dictionary. It's kind of like "chili" in that you'll get a reference to a pepper, but nobody likes, makes, or eats "chili" in that sense.
In this case, the menu most likely got plugged into an online translater. Without 청국장 in its vocabulary, the translater looked at the underlying Chinese meaning for each syllable and went from there. 청 is 靑 (blue) and 국장 is 局長 (bureau director).
It's real easy to mess up like this because Korean has both indigenous words and Chinese imports. I remember the time I learned the word for pine tree: 소나무. "소" (小) is the word for "small" in Chinese and 나무 is tree, so I thought it literally meant "small tree."
But no, it doesn't work like that. You can't split up indigenous Korean words into component syllables, get the Chinese meanings, and then reassemble the word. That's like explaining "accidental homocide" as "when dentists kill gay people."
All this underscores the importance of checking with a native speaker before you put something in the public eye.
My favorite story is about a friend of a friend who's a big Bears fan. He wanted to get a tattoo of the Chinese character for "Bear," so he checked online, printed the character out, and gave it to the tattoo artist. It came out perfectly.
A while later, he ran into my high school friend and his wife, who's Japanese. When he showed off his tattoo, the wife was really confused. After some discussion, my friend (the American husband) explained to the guy that he didn't have BEAR (熊), he had BEAR (忍), "to endure patiently." As in "Dude, if you want this fixed, you're going to have to bear with a lot of pain."
That guy walked away very sad.
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