Menu translation: Arabic to English
Transliteration needs to be decided once
There is no single correct romanisation. Shawarma, shwarma and shawurma all appear; so do kibbeh, kibbe and kubba. Any of them can be right, but a menu that uses two spellings for the same dish looks careless and splits the search traffic for it.
Pick one spelling per dish, record it, and reuse it everywhere — menu, signage, delivery platforms. Consistency matters more here than which variant you choose.
Right-to-left is a layout problem, not a text problem
Arabic runs right to left, but prices, quantities and Latin-script brand names inside the line do not. Mixed-direction text renders unpredictably unless the page sets direction explicitly, and the usual failure is a price landing on the wrong side of the dish or a bracket flipping.
This is why an Arabic menu is worth checking on a phone rather than approving from a document. The bug only shows at the point of rendering.
Sesame, nuts and dietary expectation
Tahini runs through a large part of the repertoire — hummus, halva, many dressings — which makes sesame a first-order allergen rather than an edge case. Pistachio, pine nut and walnut appear in both savoury and sweet courses.
Guests may also be looking for halal status, which is a sourcing and preparation fact rather than a translation one. If you make the claim, make it on the strength of your supply chain, and say what it covers.
How Intermenu handles Arabic → English
Intermenu treats every menu entity as a structured record — name, description, ingredients, allergen tags, diet tags — so translation happens per field rather than across a wall of text. Allergen and diet data are tags, not sentences, which is why they keep working when the menu renders in English.
Machine translation produces the first draft; a human reviews before a locale is published, and the review state is recorded per translation.