Auto-translating your menu

What this covers

Offering your menu in other languages without retyping it. Needs the manage-settings permission.

Set the languages first

On the menu settings, set your main language — the one you write in — and add any extra languages you want to offer. Nothing can be translated until a language is on that list, because the translate window only offers the ones you have added.

Choose them by who actually walks in. Two languages you maintain beat six you do not.

Translating

Open Auto Translate Menu, pick a target language, and run it. It translates, in one pass:

categories · items · descriptions · allergens · tags · option groups · options

In other words the whole menu, not just the dish names. A progress indicator runs while it works.

Overwrite existing translations is the one setting to think about:

• Off — only fills in what is missing. This is what you want after adding a few new dishes, because it leaves the wording you have already corrected alone.
• On — redoes everything, discarding your edits. Use it only when you want a clean sweep.

Read it before you trust it

Machine translation is very good and occasionally very wrong, and food is one of its weaker subjects. Dish names, regional specialities and cooking methods are where it slips.

• Get a native speaker to read it once. Ten minutes, and it catches the one item that has become nonsense.
• Check the allergens especially. This is the part where a mistranslation can matter to somebody's health.
• Edit anything wrong by hand — translations are just text, and yours will survive the next run as long as Overwrite is off.
• Consider leaving proper names alone. A dish called "Kleftiko" is called Kleftiko in every language.

What the guest sees

A language switcher on the menu page. They pick their language and the menu re-reads in it — while your kitchen and your own screens carry on in your language. Nothing about your working menu changes.

Keeping it current

Translations do not update themselves. When you change a price nothing needs doing — prices are numbers — but if you rename a dish or rewrite a description, the old translation is still sitting there.

A simple habit: after any round of menu edits, run the translation again with Overwrite off, then skim the new items.