Stomachs, intestines, etc.

When translating and writing a menu, it's important that I take the time to carefully consider my choice of words. In Japan, restaurants offer many things that are either unfamiliar or completely unknown to foreign customers who will be reading an English menu, so it's necessary to provide enough description so that they have a good idea of what it is they're ordering while not letting the menu become excessively long and wordy. Also, I want to make the items on the menu sound as appealing as possible so that people might actually want to order them.

How could I do that though with something like 赤セン (the 3rd stomach of a cow)? As far as I knew we didn't have any kind of elegant word for that in English, and, at least to me, nothing could be more unappealingly worded than "3rd stomach of a cow."  There must be some special culinary words out there for these things to make them sound less disgusting, I thought, and I was right. Here's an article I found on cooksinfo.com with a detailed explanation of the different stomachs of the cow which was very educational. For another example of a potentially unappetizingly worded dish,  ネギテッチャン (large intestine and green onions); still unsure if there's a better, more appealing word for intestine. Here is a case where a yakiniku restaurant's menu was poorly translated. We end up with things like "pig's tits." I'll have the pig's tits please. This is what we want to avoid. 

I've actually had テッチャン before and it's not that bad, chewy and soft, takes a while to swallow.

New menu translation gig!

Score! I got handed a menu a couple days ago for a high end 焼き肉 restaurant (the kind where you grill meat at your table, Korean style) in Kyoto, and I'll be translating it and re-designing it over the next few weeks, so I'll be posting updates on how that's going. So far its actually more difficult than I thought. Being a menu for a Korean style restaurant, there are a lot of Korean words which are written in katakana, so figuring out how to best translate them is a multi-step process of searching the word in Japanese, reading an explanation of what it means in Japanese, and thinking about how you'd say that in English in a way that would be both elegant and clear to someone looking at a menu. Here's one tasty example:

水菜のチョレギサラダ

水菜 (pronounced mizuna) is a type of green that resembles arugula to me (but may or may not be completely unrelated). I'm not sure whether or not it's ok to just say "mizuna" in the English menu. I mean, I bet a chef would know what mizuna is, but your average person probably doesn't. If you put 水菜 in a dictionary it comes up either as "mizuna" or "potherb mustard," something I've never heard of in my life... so I went with "mizuna greens," it's simple and you can get an idea of what it is you're ordering, which is the most important thing in this case.

チョレギ is a Korean word, so I looked it up in Japanese and found that what it means is "lightly or briefly pickled/soaked." So I was thinking it had some kind of pickled aspect, but then I asked somebody who said no it's not pickled, but the dressing has vinegar... so now I'm not really sure what to call this salad. It may just end up being "Mizuna greens choregi salad." Yes, I realize the fastest solution would be for me to go to the restaurant and taste everything on the menu. That would be both awesome because free food, and not awesome because I don't eat stomachs and intestines and stuff like that.