The website seems to have fallen due to the HN hug of death, but I've seen this making rounds in the Polish news - there have been screenshots of slang mentions of female genitals in the Polish version of Aliexpress.
likely. they do have extensive underwear and sex toy collections and their prices are very low compared to shops in europe that sell the same stuff way overpriced
I don't know, I got "Höschen für ficken" too a while ago and WTFed. It sounds like a bad machine translation tbh, not like something anyone would say/type. So if anything it had to be searched a lot in other languages and then be translated automatically, but that's... a weird approach? Why not track the most searched terms for each localized version individually?
Generally I don't know what most people buy on AliExpress though. For me it's for electronics parts/sensors/... where I can't find a cheap offering on Amazon, or if I feel adventurous and want to try out some weird electronics device that you can't get here at all. But do people buy panties on AliExpress? Doesn't sound like you'd save much, you can get them pretty cheap on Amazon etc. But maybe the ones on Amazon are unsuitable for fscking?
Loaded up the website, German locale, I got this suggestion too.
I guess to test the theory about "most popular search", one would have to get a botnet to search for a random string, to see if it would show up as a suggestion.
As a side effect, the bot that monitors the suggestions and create spam offers might start offering "e99a507d-c1ef-416c-b704-166561a44ccd" for sale...
Popular Porcelainese search terms or catalogue sections, presumably not obscene, automatically translated to European?
Actual popular Dutch search terms from Dutch-locale users wouldn't be obscene (presumably).
I don't think Aliexpress sells fornicating women. I have no clue why anyone would type in that - if anyone is looking for adult-oriented entertainment, add "dvd" or "film" (both have exact same spelling + meaning in dutch).
Aliexpress is (as far as i know) a place where you buy things. This suggestion is not abuyable thing.
On the contrary, if you are interested in this kind of entertainment, it is not unreasonable to look for “women fucking” and expect results related to that and not actual human beings. Not that I would do that. Ahem…
Anyway, I regularly just enter keywords without appending “book” when I am looking for some books on Amazon. For example, I would not expect “WWII aircraft carriers” to return a listing for the actual thing.
I have also noticed a very sudden inrush of "adult-themed" products in the endless matrices of suggestions (with thumbnail images!) that are plastered all over the site.
I would very much appreciate a way to turn those product groups off, since they disrupt my searches for weird handtools, components, and other stuff that I actually buy (and quite often, I've been a customer since 2014).
Tangent, but in similar vein, has anyone seen in the past year or two on Dell.com their cookie notification? The “I agree” button has consistently said “Everyone’s the Acceptor” for me.
At first I thought there was something weird going on client-side, but it happens to me on every OS. Just took this screenshot on my iPhone:
I saw this the other day. I love to see little tidbits of dev insanity bleed through into final products, though I hope it wasn't crunch-induced insanity.
A bank dev team I may or may not have worked in, accidentally deployed «allrighty, chap» on the confirmation button for fund purchases. Might have caused some consternation.
We once did an order cancelling feature in crunch. The prompt had a cancel button in green (which will actually cancel order) and a cancel button in white.
Their site must be doing location detection, because it served me a cookie warning in half-English, half-Japanesee. The blue box is "Agree to everything and continue", which is grammatical (if verbose).
The rest of the message, though ... it starts off "Our website is Cookie (クッキー)" and looks like two translations got jammed together.
Exhibitionists certainly like to use it, since AlixExpress allows uploading images in the reviews... some interesting things to be seen when browsing lingerie reviews, or so I've been told cough
I can confirm that this happens in Italian as well. I've never visited the site before and my search placeholders in the top bar are just full of weird NSFW terms.
Weirdly, it only happens to the desktop site, if I access it via mobile I get mostly normal suggestions.
My Spanish isn't perfect, but the suggestion text "hombres denudos xxx" seems like it might not be to everyone's liking. Too bad they don't have a Swedish site, I'm curious what they'd come up with for us!
I have tried to contact them several times for at least 7 years because they have a bug on the orders confirmation page for my local language. It displays HTML code instead of the translated text.
One time someone even answered that they are aware of it.
I'm confident the localizations are done on the fly, automatically; it makes sense, as it did ten+ years ago, to pull a site's content through google translate or an equivalent so that you cover more languages. But it has flaws, obviously.
I can imagine translation engines don't do very well with just one off words and phrases like "accept all" as mentioned in the comment about Dell's website, instead of them being used in a sentence.
It's translation engines and the cheapest translation services, who will also try to use automation as much as possible.
They probably went like my previous client through a cycle of starting with a single text file of bad words --> to integrating with one proper swearing service (pottymouth, cleanspeak, etc. --> to several services in fallback mode in several languages --> to realising with their traffic that costs a bomb so to back to static files again. Hopefully i18n bundles but probably as you say just in a couple languages.
I have always been able to swear everywhere online in Norwegian.
This reminds me of another translation Aliexpress (used to?) make for the Dutch version. In English, "China" can mean 2 things:
- The country
- The ceramic material
In Dutch these have 2 different words("China" and "Porselein"). Aliexpress translated "China" in the "Shipping from" section to "Porselein"(so the ceramic material).
Few things scares me away as fast from a shop as an obviously machine translated web page.
I have no issue buying from a English webpage, but a webpage machine translated to danish makes me doubt the competence of the page and if its even possible for me to communicate with customer support if needed.
Agreed. For some reason, translation is considered secondary, and many websites resort to automatic translation tools. They produce content that seems "good enough" but often result in snafus like this.
A proper translation company would cost a lot more, sure, but the results would be orders of magnitude better.
This is somewhat similar to the way money is spent on making movies. Pennies are saved during the writing process, and millions wasted on stars, locations, special effects, to shoot pointless scenes in stories that make no sense.
> Pennies are saved during the writing process, and millions wasted on stars, locations, special effects, to shoot pointless scenes in stories that make no sense.
I believe that's not incompetence but risk aversion. They're deathly afraid of trying anything that deviates from the norm because they will lose money if they don't make something that makes all focus groups happy.
DeepL, for example, fails hilariously with certain inputs. I once got it to mistranslate things like these:
- "孔明" (Kongming, the genius strategist/statesman from China's Three Kingdoms period) got translated as "Confucius"
- "chage and aska" (a Japanese pop music duo) got translated as "曹操" (Cao Cao, founder of the Wei state during China's Three Kingdoms period) or even "ちんちん" (literally "penis" in Japanese)
Google Translate once translated 万 (ten thousand in Chinese) to “million” for me. I was shocked it could make such a basic mistake. It wasn’t even that long ago, maybe 2018? Machine translation has a loooong way to go.
Not so bad for a machine, I once met a French Telco guy in charge of buying/selling minutes at a large operator who thought that "billion" meant "two million"
Same in Norway. I'm from the US and the large numbers always take some thought. I didn't realize that I'd have to relearn counting when moving here, but honestly it is easier than trying to relate the time of day.
The fact that international confusion over billions doesn't arise more often points out how bad people are at thinking about large numbers. We mostly don't notice the difference between a billion and a trillion.
It was like that in 2020 as well -- I remember being really confused trying to see how many views a Daoko video on billibilli had.
IIRC at that point it would translate e.g. "23 万" correctly, but 23万 would go to 23 million.
I tried reporting the error, no idea if they actually pay attention to those!
> Machine translation has a loooong way to go.
Since large numbers on e.g. streaming sites are often reported in multiples of 万 in Chinese, but a million in English, I did wonder if the machine "learned" that they were equivalent.
I gave it a try but only got suggestions to search for "hoesje voor samsung galaxy a12" (phone case for Samsung A12), "hulpmiddelen voor bandenreparatie" (tyre repair things) and "horloges mannen horloge luxe merk" (luxury brad male watches) and similar things. I never shopped at Aliexpress so I do not have a search history there, I also wipe cookies and browser-stored data between visits to commercial properties and I refuse all third-party content (31% of the Aliexpress front page is blocked but it still seems to work). Could these lewd suggestions be related to whatever it happens to infer from the visitor's history? It is worth an experiment...
I just set up an unprotected browser (Chrome) in a container and cycled through the nl.aliexpress.com front page about 30 times. It gave me a number of suggestions like the ones mentioned above, none of them of sexual nature. I then closed nl.aliexpress.com and opened pornhub.com and xhamster.com, closed those sites again and opened nl.aliexpress.com again in a new tab. It gave me a suggestion of 'neukende vrouwen' (fucking women) after reloading the site three times. This could be a coincidence, of course.
I don't know, I opened nl.aliexpress.com in a private browser tab and immediately got the NSFW suggestion on first try.
The class of the div where the suggestions are placed is class="hot-words", so I would say this is the result of someone spamming the search box with nasty terms and AliExpress just showing them based on 'popularity'.
Try looking for Raspberry Pi related stuff on Ali. It's funny how many times the auto-translated text talks about "frambozentaart" (Dutch for raspberry pie). Gotta love it.
That reminds me of the automatic translator in Telegram. If for example you translate from German to English and the message includes a German flag emoji, under certain conditions (that aren't very clear to me) it will turn into a British flag.
Oh man, Imgur has definitely fallen victim to asshole design. I was confused with the image you had linked for a while until I realized the image was hidden under a banner ad.
The one I was looking at was a completed unrelated “suggested image”.
It's just a slightly weird translation of a popular search query, which Aliexpress uses as search text placeholder. But that's actual items that Aliexpress sells and they do exactly what the text says, so there is nothing really wrong here on a technical level.
Now if those items or their search queries should make it into front-page recommendation, that's another story.
What exactly is "women having sex" a weird translation for? I can get how "panties for sex" is an awkward translation for lingerie, but the Dutch one seems off.
If I go to nl.aliexpress.com I get "neukende vrouwen naakt bikini" which translates to "fucking women nude bikini" which is the game-of-telephone version of "panties for sex". OP got a shorter version with the "naakt bikini" missing.
Aliexpress at one point decided I was going to have to learn either Russian or Hebrew if I wanted to shop there again. It seems tied to my account as it just flips me right back to either one of those languages when I log in. It helped me get out of my low-key shopping addiction at least.
A few months ago, one of the sellers I had purchased some stuff from (only for about €200 over a span of 2 years) contacted me on my personal email and asked in very broken English if everything was alright since he hadn't seen me in a while. He sent me a bunch of coupons for his Aliexpress shop and several links to those really well made fakes everyone is always looking for on there (so now you know, the trick to finding those is through your Shanghai bff :) ).
The products are cheap, the sellers surprisingly kind, but the place itself is just really weird!
Despite living in Hong Kong and traveling frequently to Shenzhen at the time, I found out from a high school buddy from growing up in Ohio that lived in the USA and had no real connection to China besides this one business trip.
It appears someone who couldn't read english at all had used baidu translate to translate the menu. It turned out baidu translate was translating "扒饭" - assorted grilled meats - to my Twitter (HN, etc) username for YEARS.
Fun fact: just as the Chinese (and I think other asian cultures) utilize "rice"(their staple grain) as a synoym for a meal so in English we use the concept of a staple grain as a synoym for a meal: meal.
As far as I can tell, "meal" (time) and "meal" (flour) have different etymological origins. There was still a difference in spelling in Middle English (mel vs mele), but that distinction was lost in Modern English.[0]
That's because in Victorian times the lower classes often couldn't afford a meal at that time and had to subside on some tea and perhaps a slice of bread.
The use of "tea" for that meal remains a class signifier; my paternal grandmother used it, my parents did not (my mother, despite not being a native speaker, presumably is the one who eradicated it from my father's vocabulary), and yet I continue to say unwittingly say it occasionally though I now live in the USA. A vestigial Australianism in my case
It's definitely "non-U" in the UK, though that whole world is mostly gone.
I've heard it as "breaking bread." I like the phrase. But yeah, it's essentially the same as eating bread, and it clearly refers to having a meal and is not limited to bread.
I'm also a random person on the Internet, but I can confirm that "饭" can mean both "rice (米)" or meal, depends on the combination of word. "吃饭" almost always mean "have/having/had a meal".
However, based on my research (1), "扒饭" is likely a meal type rather than an action. For example, "鸡扒饭" consists of a bowl of rice covered by a layer of pre-cooked chicken breast plus some veggies. The rice itself seemed normally cooked, not grilled. And yes, this sounded very similar to "盖浇饭" which is also a meal type.
(Me been a local to the country, you would assume that I knew this kind of things. Well...no, this is the first time I learned this term. But if someone asks me "Hey do you want some 鸡扒饭?", I'll take my chances.)
I'm a native Chinese. I think it's 猪扒 饭 or 鸡扒 饭, 猪扒=猪排=pork chops*.
Note: 排 literally means ribs. But this dish has been evolved quite a bit and now 猪排 could be any part of pork, and I'd say pork chop is actually more common than actual ribs nowadays. Same goes to chicken - 鸡排/鸡扒 is typically just chicken breast (not like chicken has ribs to begin with, hehe).
no 吃饭 doesn’t always mean have a meal, when asking if some one would prefer rice or noodle, it’s ‘吃饭还是吃面‘ ( you eat rice or noodle), it heavily depends on the context.
Naver, a major Korean website, has its own MT service called Papago [1] which rivals Google translate for supported language pairs. One day it started to translate a URL to Amazon German to an email address of my friend, who is a member of the KDE localization team and presumably his address made into the bilingual corpus Papago used. It took him years and also a governmental intervention to realize the origin of mysterious emails and sort the whole thing out.
At least you can't fake French cuisine. There's no powdered substitute for actual pork assholes stuffed inside other pork assholes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andouillette
Hey, the first time I visited Vietnam I was blind tired from traveling, sat down at an outdoor restaurant on a kindergarten sized chair, got a warm beer and looked at a menu where everything was in Vietnamese. The only thing in English was "AMERICAN BEEFSTEAK". So I ordered that (dumb, sure, but they were really amused to have an actual American there. It was a really fun scene, late night and lit up, busy joint).
I'm pretty much 100% certain that what came out of the kitchen was a filet of dog. It was a piece of meat. It was a bit charred. Definitely neither pork nor beef. But red. Thin, like it was from alongside the ribs of a medium sized animal. Gamey. A bit stringy. Tough. I ate it, but I cried inside. (My ex got some nameless white fish from the Mekong and was sick for a couple days, so I was kinda lucky).
So yeah, watch out for when they translate you into "American-style" something. What they usually mean is "barbarian" lol
My only hope that maybe I didn't eat dog came after I'd lived there for a few months, and realized dogs are relatively special dishes. A restaurant across the street from me kept one in a cage on the side of the patio, which I'm pretty sure was eaten for a wedding. (It disappeared the same night as most of the fish in their tank). Having said that, the "american beefsteak" was definitely expensive compared to everything else on the menu, and was certainly a premium item.
It's true though that regular chicken in Vietnam is as gamey as duck, because it isn't hormone-fed and water filled. So maybe this was just beef. But I never had any other beef there that tasted like it.
I will explain the reasonings, but I hope that you don't have to read on and just believe my intuition that you really ate beef. This is better for your peace of mind I think :-)
- Dog meat is served in specific places, it's not something widely available (like you noticed in your reply). The place that serves it will usually have "Dog meat" in the name of the restaurant (in Vietnamese: "Thit cho")
- You mentioned sitting outside on "kindergarten-sized chair". This is what Vietnamese people call "quán vỉa hè" and not many of those places serve dog meat.
- You mentioned "a filet of ..." "a piece of meat" "a bit charred" and "red". Out of those 4 bits of information, only "a bit charred" makes sense for dog meat. But dog meat is always cooked into some special dishes, and never "filet" with just "one piece".
- If the menu was all in Vietnamese and only one item had English, saying "American Beefsteak" and being priced higher, then it would be a special cut of Beef aimed towards foreigners.
- "Gamey" "A bit stringy" "Tough" is exactly the words describing texture of Vietnamese beef, some specialty beef places will have this type of beef cut (remember, you're in a country where for most people the best way to eat beef is to have it diced thin stir-fried, cooked well done. people don't usually eat steaks.)
Keep in mind that:
- This varies a lot depending on the parts of the country where you visited. Since you did not specify where you ate this, I'm assuming Urban/City outskirts area, belonging to a Southern city/province or Northern city/province and am basing my intuition on this. If this happened in a very rural area or mountainous area, then my comments on dog meat being served in special places does not apply, but the comments about the meat you described still apply.
- Dog meat page on Vietnamese Wikipedia (graphic images, beware): https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%E1%BB%8Bt_ch%C3%B3 (some images from S.Korea and China mixed in, Vietnamese prepare their dogs differently)
Reminds me of a Chinese menu item that was translated into Korean as "서부 아프리카 원주민의 쓰라린 추위" (bitter coldness of indigenous Western Africans). Made rounds in the Korean internet some years ago.
154 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 171 ms ] threadGenerally I don't know what most people buy on AliExpress though. For me it's for electronics parts/sensors/... where I can't find a cheap offering on Amazon, or if I feel adventurous and want to try out some weird electronics device that you can't get here at all. But do people buy panties on AliExpress? Doesn't sound like you'd save much, you can get them pretty cheap on Amazon etc. But maybe the ones on Amazon are unsuitable for fscking?
I guess to test the theory about "most popular search", one would have to get a botnet to search for a random string, to see if it would show up as a suggestion.
As a side effect, the bot that monitors the suggestions and create spam offers might start offering "e99a507d-c1ef-416c-b704-166561a44ccd" for sale...
Aliexpress is (as far as i know) a place where you buy things. This suggestion is not abuyable thing.
Anyway, I regularly just enter keywords without appending “book” when I am looking for some books on Amazon. For example, I would not expect “WWII aircraft carriers” to return a listing for the actual thing.
I would very much appreciate a way to turn those product groups off, since they disrupt my searches for weird handtools, components, and other stuff that I actually buy (and quite often, I've been a customer since 2014).
I can’t at all remember where that flag is, and tbh some products are shown anyway, but it’s there.
At first I thought there was something weird going on client-side, but it happens to me on every OS. Just took this screenshot on my iPhone:
https://i.ibb.co/r4M5Cb9/52238-CC7-81-BD-4-B3-D-934-F-77-DB9...
(from URL: https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-laptops/sf/xps-laptops )
I figure we should just have left it like that.
The rest of the message, though ... it starts off "Our website is Cookie (クッキー)" and looks like two translations got jammed together.
https://i.imgur.com/1u5mwLT.png
Coming soon... AliHub? AliXXXpress?
If anything, Chinese typically don't really use Aliexpress at all, but Taobao or TMall.
Weirdly, it only happens to the desktop site, if I access it via mobile I get mostly normal suggestions.
One time someone even answered that they are aware of it.
I can imagine translation engines don't do very well with just one off words and phrases like "accept all" as mentioned in the comment about Dell's website, instead of them being used in a sentence.
It's translation engines and the cheapest translation services, who will also try to use automation as much as possible.
I have always been able to swear everywhere online in Norwegian.
- The country
- The ceramic material
In Dutch these have 2 different words("China" and "Porselein"). Aliexpress translated "China" in the "Shipping from" section to "Porselein"(so the ceramic material).
I have no issue buying from a English webpage, but a webpage machine translated to danish makes me doubt the competence of the page and if its even possible for me to communicate with customer support if needed.
A proper translation company would cost a lot more, sure, but the results would be orders of magnitude better.
This is somewhat similar to the way money is spent on making movies. Pennies are saved during the writing process, and millions wasted on stars, locations, special effects, to shoot pointless scenes in stories that make no sense.
I believe that's not incompetence but risk aversion. They're deathly afraid of trying anything that deviates from the norm because they will lose money if they don't make something that makes all focus groups happy.
DeepL, for example, fails hilariously with certain inputs. I once got it to mistranslate things like these:
- "孔明" (Kongming, the genius strategist/statesman from China's Three Kingdoms period) got translated as "Confucius"
- "chage and aska" (a Japanese pop music duo) got translated as "曹操" (Cao Cao, founder of the Wei state during China's Three Kingdoms period) or even "ちんちん" (literally "penis" in Japanese)
AI finally reached the level of a lazy high school history student who didn't study enough.
IIRC at that point it would translate e.g. "23 万" correctly, but 23万 would go to 23 million.
I tried reporting the error, no idea if they actually pay attention to those!
> Machine translation has a loooong way to go.
Since large numbers on e.g. streaming sites are often reported in multiples of 万 in Chinese, but a million in English, I did wonder if the machine "learned" that they were equivalent.
I just set up an unprotected browser (Chrome) in a container and cycled through the nl.aliexpress.com front page about 30 times. It gave me a number of suggestions like the ones mentioned above, none of them of sexual nature. I then closed nl.aliexpress.com and opened pornhub.com and xhamster.com, closed those sites again and opened nl.aliexpress.com again in a new tab. It gave me a suggestion of 'neukende vrouwen' (fucking women) after reloading the site three times. This could be a coincidence, of course.
The class of the div where the suggestions are placed is class="hot-words", so I would say this is the result of someone spamming the search box with nasty terms and AliExpress just showing them based on 'popularity'.
I thought some user-specific ad-specific search-specific shenanigans were going on for my account... :D
https://imgur.com/a/C8zV5Do
I'm already searching in German, so no need to translate; and it 'translated' by replacing 'Englisch' into 'Deutsch'.
Top marks amazon! :D
The one I was looking at was a completed unrelated “suggested image”.
Now if those items or their search queries should make it into front-page recommendation, that's another story.
Next week they will do 'medications'?
A few months ago, one of the sellers I had purchased some stuff from (only for about €200 over a span of 2 years) contacted me on my personal email and asked in very broken English if everything was alright since he hadn't seen me in a while. He sent me a bunch of coupons for his Aliexpress shop and several links to those really well made fakes everyone is always looking for on there (so now you know, the trick to finding those is through your Shanghai bff :) ).
The products are cheap, the sellers surprisingly kind, but the place itself is just really weird!
Despite living in Hong Kong and traveling frequently to Shenzhen at the time, I found out from a high school buddy from growing up in Ohio that lived in the USA and had no real connection to China besides this one business trip.
It appears someone who couldn't read english at all had used baidu translate to translate the menu. It turned out baidu translate was translating "扒饭" - assorted grilled meats - to my Twitter (HN, etc) username for YEARS.
https://twitter.com/larrysalibra/status/959749866036408320
Crazy world.
Lesson: if you can't read the language, blindly trusting translation is always a bit of a gamble!
It's common to say 吃饭 (eat rice) as a way of saying "to have a meal".
Unsure what it is supposed to mean in this context though.
(note: also don't trust a random person on the internet - me - with your translations)
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/meal
The use of "tea" for that meal remains a class signifier; my paternal grandmother used it, my parents did not (my mother, despite not being a native speaker, presumably is the one who eradicated it from my father's vocabulary), and yet I continue to say unwittingly say it occasionally though I now live in the USA. A vestigial Australianism in my case
It's definitely "non-U" in the UK, though that whole world is mostly gone.
However, based on my research (1), "扒饭" is likely a meal type rather than an action. For example, "鸡扒饭" consists of a bowl of rice covered by a layer of pre-cooked chicken breast plus some veggies. The rice itself seemed normally cooked, not grilled. And yes, this sounded very similar to "盖浇饭" which is also a meal type.
1: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=%E6%89%92%E9%A5%AD&iax=images&ia=i... yes, quite literally a re-search
(Me been a local to the country, you would assume that I knew this kind of things. Well...no, this is the first time I learned this term. But if someone asks me "Hey do you want some 鸡扒饭?", I'll take my chances.)
Note: 排 literally means ribs. But this dish has been evolved quite a bit and now 猪排 could be any part of pork, and I'd say pork chop is actually more common than actual ribs nowadays. Same goes to chicken - 鸡排/鸡扒 is typically just chicken breast (not like chicken has ribs to begin with, hehe).
So like “break bread”, “earning bread”, “bread and butter” etc.
[1] https://papago.naver.com/
I'm pretty much 100% certain that what came out of the kitchen was a filet of dog. It was a piece of meat. It was a bit charred. Definitely neither pork nor beef. But red. Thin, like it was from alongside the ribs of a medium sized animal. Gamey. A bit stringy. Tough. I ate it, but I cried inside. (My ex got some nameless white fish from the Mekong and was sick for a couple days, so I was kinda lucky).
So yeah, watch out for when they translate you into "American-style" something. What they usually mean is "barbarian" lol
My only hope that maybe I didn't eat dog came after I'd lived there for a few months, and realized dogs are relatively special dishes. A restaurant across the street from me kept one in a cage on the side of the patio, which I'm pretty sure was eaten for a wedding. (It disappeared the same night as most of the fish in their tank). Having said that, the "american beefsteak" was definitely expensive compared to everything else on the menu, and was certainly a premium item.
It's true though that regular chicken in Vietnam is as gamey as duck, because it isn't hormone-fed and water filled. So maybe this was just beef. But I never had any other beef there that tasted like it.
- Dog meat is served in specific places, it's not something widely available (like you noticed in your reply). The place that serves it will usually have "Dog meat" in the name of the restaurant (in Vietnamese: "Thit cho")
- You mentioned sitting outside on "kindergarten-sized chair". This is what Vietnamese people call "quán vỉa hè" and not many of those places serve dog meat.
- You mentioned "a filet of ..." "a piece of meat" "a bit charred" and "red". Out of those 4 bits of information, only "a bit charred" makes sense for dog meat. But dog meat is always cooked into some special dishes, and never "filet" with just "one piece".
- If the menu was all in Vietnamese and only one item had English, saying "American Beefsteak" and being priced higher, then it would be a special cut of Beef aimed towards foreigners.
- "Gamey" "A bit stringy" "Tough" is exactly the words describing texture of Vietnamese beef, some specialty beef places will have this type of beef cut (remember, you're in a country where for most people the best way to eat beef is to have it diced thin stir-fried, cooked well done. people don't usually eat steaks.)
Keep in mind that:
- This varies a lot depending on the parts of the country where you visited. Since you did not specify where you ate this, I'm assuming Urban/City outskirts area, belonging to a Southern city/province or Northern city/province and am basing my intuition on this. If this happened in a very rural area or mountainous area, then my comments on dog meat being served in special places does not apply, but the comments about the meat you described still apply.
Some links to see:
- Some exotic cuts of beef in Vietnam: https://vinpearl.com/vi/bo-to-tay-ninh-va-12-dia-chi-thuong-... ( archive.today link: http://archive.today/Hr9DY )
- Dog meat page on Vietnamese Wikipedia (graphic images, beware): https://vi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%E1%BB%8Bt_ch%C3%B3 (some images from S.Korea and China mixed in, Vietnamese prepare their dogs differently)