Translate your menu without howlers

Translate your dishes

One dish name per line, fifteen at most per translation. The source language is French — this tool is built for French menus served to international guests.

Why consumer translators betray menus

A restaurant menu is an unusual kind of text: short noun phrases, no verbs, and context that is never written down. A general-purpose engine, deprived of that context, picks the most likely reading — and on an isolated word, the most likely reading is rarely the culinary one.

The textbook case is “magret de canard aux cèpes” rendered with a word meaning button mushroom, or “côte de bœuf” translated as a coastline. None of these mistakes is visible to someone who does not speak the target language: they surface only when a guest raises an eyebrow, or never at all.

• Kitchen terms — deglaze, confit, sear, reduce — rarely have a direct equivalent and often come out as nonsense.
• Proper nouns and designations (Comté, Guérande, Label Rouge, PDO) must stay in French: translating them destroys the selling point.
• Doneness levels (bleu, saignant, à point) are a French classification with no exact match elsewhere; they need explaining, not translating.
• Allergens tolerate no approximation: an error on “nuts” has consequences well beyond commercial embarrassment.

Which languages should your menu cover?

Activating every available language when your guests are mostly German neighbours is a poor trade. The sound method starts from your actual guests, not from a global ranking of languages.

Two free sources are enough to decide: the tourism statistics for your area, and the languages of your own online reviews over the past twelve months. They almost always agree, and the answer is local.

1. List the languages of your last twelve months of reviews.
2. Cross-check with your local tourist board's visitor figures.
3. Start with the top two, and only those.
4. Add a third only once the first two are genuinely maintained.

The real cost is not translating, it is maintaining

Translating a menu once takes an hour. The trouble starts afterwards: at the first dish change, the French version moves ahead and the others fall behind. Six months later a Dutch guest orders a dish that no longer exists, and nobody in the building is in a position to notice.

That is why a table pasted into a document is a stopgap, not an organisation. When translations are carried by the dishes themselves, one edit propagates everywhere at once and the drift between versions cannot build up. The multilingual menu guide explains how to organise it.

What this tool does with your data

This is the only one of the free tools that sends anything to a server: translation cannot happen in your browser. The dish names you submit go to our server, which has them translated, returns the result, and keeps none of it — not the source text, not the translation, and no identifying trace in the logs.

The processing is strictly ephemeral: there is no database where what you typed could be found, including by us. The anti-robot check and the fifteen-line cap are not there to hinder you but to bound a service whose every call has a real cost, and which stays free and account-free.

Frequently asked questions