It was, furthermore, a shaggy and outlandish kind of Chinese

It was, furthermore, a shaggy and outlandish kind of Chinese. In the extreme north-west of China they speak what I take to be a variant of the Shansi dialect. it is not as incomprehensible as the southern dialects, being based closely on mandarin; but it was disconcerting to find (for instance) that 'water' was fi instead of shui, that she-me (meaning 'what') had contracted to sa, and that normen, not wormen, meant 'we'. I found myself, mutatis mutandis, in roughly the position of a Chinese who, after cursorily studying the first chapters of a modern English primer, is turned loose in the remoter parts of eighteenth century Yorkshire.

P. Fleming, News from Tartary (1936), 167

You are referring to the Immense Tyrant Without Compare

Here's the problem with Mandarin: move an inch outside your speciality, and there is no guarantee that any of the words will mean anything to you. I had been speaking Chinese for twenty years, and was in town to give a lecture on medieval history, but the strange sigils describing arcane translation nightmares, like McFlurry and McNugget, might as well have been Martian.

...

'What's that thing called,' I began wearily, 'which is very big probably the biggest thing that you have, and there are two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, all in a sesame seed bun?'

'Ah,' said the bespectacled youth before me, 'you are referring to the Immense Tyrant Without Compare (ju wu ba).'

At last, a new use for the archaic term for a Bronze Age overlord, now recognised by twenty-first-century Chinese teenagers as the word for a Big Mac. 

J. Clements, The Emperor's feast (2021), 194-5

There is no subjunctive perfect in Chinese

There was something of a tussle within the family over who would translate Dr Chao's prose into English. Her daughter did much of the work, only for Chao's linguist husband to step in and pepper the account with hectoring qualifications - 'There is no subjunctive perfect in Chinese,' he harrumphs, in an entirely unnecessary footnote to a paragraph about what to say when someone serves you Shark's Fin Soup. But at the end of the family feuding a firm text remained, often in quaintly off-kilter English, and with a few translation decisions that would endure.

J. Clements, The Emperor's feast (2021), 162