Beijing has corrected over 6,500 traffic signs and will next target other public facilities including toilets, museums, hospitals, sports venues and restaurant menus in an endeavor to weed out bad English translations before the 2008 Olympics.

It will be an unbearable embarrassment to have a public sign reading "Racist Park" - a venue dedicated to ethnic minorities (Min Zuyuan) during the Games when numerous foreign guests will be in Beijing.

Those English translations, however, may be relatively easy to correct. What about the restaurant menus?

Among the next moves, many howlers on restaurant menus, such as "cow bowel in sauce", "corrugated iron beef" and "acid food" will be targeted.

"In standardizing the menus, we will take both China's splendid catering culture and practicability into consideration. The names of the dishes should be simple but clear," an official said on the press conference given by BOCOG, adding the names are supposed to signal what food the customers are going to eat.

However, it is really a hard work to combine the culture and practicability. Many Chinese-style dishes have legend stores behind them while others can't be distinguished as what they are made from merely through their names.