We had another one of those Russian mountain moments in my ESL class this week when I asked my students what to call this kind of graph. Nobody thought it was a pie chart, and instead they all translated the name from their own language – and it was hilarious.
The Koreans had a very pragmatic approach, calling it a circle chart. The Brazilians got closer to the pie idea, but more Saturday-night-style, telling me that the Portuguese word translates to pizza chart. And the French speakers – well, I thought they were joking at first, but they convinced me it’s true: they call this a Camembert!
I’ve long suspected that the correct Australian translation for this breed of infographic would be ‘pizza chart’ due to the unfortunate American custom of referring to the noble pizza as a ‘pie’.
And besides, it looks nothing like a pie — a pie is either a misshapen pastry-clad object that has a distressing tendency to leak scalding and suspicious grey-brown gravy on the wielder, or (at least as my mother used to make her apple pie) a sad roadkill-cum-crumble-looking tragedy best eaten with a spoon and an active imagination than a cake-fork.