Languages your guests see
What this covers
What language your guests actually get, and the important distinction between wording Tabledoo translates
and content you have written. Changing the restaurant's language needs the manage-settings
permission.
The distinction that explains everything
There are two completely different kinds of text on a guest-facing page, and they are handled in two different ways.
| Interface wording | Your content | |
|---|---|---|
| Examples | "Party size", "Book a table", "Your reservation is confirmed" | Dish names and descriptions, event descriptions, your intro text, allergen labels |
| Who wrote it | Tabledoo | You |
| How it is translated | Already translated — follows your restaurant's language | Not translated unless you translate it |
Set your restaurant's language to French and the buttons and labels become French. Your dish names do not. They stay exactly as you typed them, because Tabledoo will not silently rewrite your menu.
Everything below follows from that one distinction.
Your three public pages
| Page | Interface wording | Your content | Guest can switch? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Booking | Your restaurant's language, by default | As you wrote it | Interface only |
| Events | Your restaurant's language, by default | As you wrote it | Interface only |
| Menu | Your restaurant's language, by default | Translated, if you have translated it | Content, and interface when both are available |
All three now carry a language switcher for a visitor who does not read your restaurant's default language — a small globe icon near the top of the page. Booking and events only ever switch the interface wording, since there is no separate content to translate there. The menu is still the exception for content: it is the page a guest reads at length, often while sitting in your restaurant, and often the page a visitor most needs in their own language, so its switcher changes the dish names and descriptions too, not just the buttons around them — and carries the interface language along automatically whenever the language a guest picks for the menu happens to be one Tabledoo has also translated (silently doing nothing to the interface otherwise, never promising a translation that is not there).
One current exception on the menu page: the surrounding chrome — the cart, order and call-waiter buttons — always shows in English right now, regardless of your restaurant's language setting. This is separate from the dish names and descriptions above, which behave exactly as the table describes. It is on our list to bring in line with the booking and events pages.
The menu language switcher
When your menu has been translated into other languages, a language switcher appears on the public menu page and guests choose for themselves.
Three things worth knowing about it:
- It only appears if you have added other languages. A menu in one language shows no switcher at all — which is correct, since there would be nothing to switch to.
- It lists the languages your menu has, not the languages Tabledoo supports. You control exactly what is offered.
- The guest's choice is remembered on their device for that menu, so someone who scans again later gets their language without asking twice.
It switches your content — the dish names and descriptions you wrote. A guest who picks Italian sees your Italian dish names.
Anything you have not translated falls back
Per dish, not per menu. If you translated most of your menu into German but added three specials since, a German-reading guest sees your German menu with those three in the original language. Nothing disappears and nothing is left blank.
Translating your menu
Two steps, and the order matters:
- Add the language to your menu in the menu settings. Until you do, there is nothing to translate into.
- Run the auto-translate tool, which translates your dish names, descriptions and option groups in one go (link Auto-translating your menu).
Then read what it produced. Machine translation is good at descriptions and unreliable at dish names — a dish called "Bishop's Finger" or a regional speciality may come out as nonsense, and some names should not be translated at all. Correct those by hand; the tool will not overwrite your fixes unless you tell it to.
Which languages to add
Your guests', not the app's. A Greek restaurant with mostly British and German visitors adds English and German whether or not its staff use those languages — the two decisions are unrelated.
Two or three well-checked languages beat eight machine-translated ones. A menu with an obviously wrong dish name reads worse than an untranslated one.
Your other written content
Everything else you write is one language, the one you typed it in:
- Your intro text on the booking, events and menu pages
- Your event descriptions
- Your chatbot FAQs, parking notes and policies
- Your tagline
There is no per-language version of these and no switcher for them. If you need to reach two audiences, the practical approach is to write both languages into the same field — a short paragraph in each, one after the other. It is not elegant, and it works.
For the chatbot specifically, that is worth doing if you get international guests: it answers from what you wrote, so a policy written only in Greek is a policy it can only explain in Greek (link Writing your FAQs).
Messages to guests
Emails and text messages go in your restaurant's language, to every guest — Tabledoo does not detect what language a guest speaks, and there is no per-guest language setting.
So choose the restaurant language your guests are most likely to read, which is not always the one your team uses. A restaurant in a tourist area may be better served sending English confirmations even if the kitchen works in another language (link Setting the app language).
Note that guest details appear in messages exactly as stored — a name is never transliterated — and times in text messages are always 24-hour in every language (link SMS: what's different).
A worked example
A restaurant in Athens: Greek staff, guests mostly British, German and Greek.
- Restaurant language: English. Most guests read it, so confirmations and the booking page are English.
- Staff set their own language to Greek in their profiles, so the team works in Greek while guests get English.
- Menu translated into Greek and German, with English as the menu's base. Guests switch on the page.
- Intro text written in English with a Greek sentence after it.
Every decision made independently, each for its own audience. That is the point of keeping the levels separate.
Good to know
Your guests never see your staff's language choices. They are personal to each person.
Right-to-left languages are handled correctly where supported.
Search engines see your public pages in your restaurant's language, which is worth considering if you rely on being found online (link SEO and analytics for your booking page).