Menu translation: English to Arabic
The layout mirrors, the numbers may not
An Arabic menu is not an English menu with different words — the whole layout mirrors. Navigation, alignment, icons with direction and the reading order of a price beside a dish all flip. A design signed off in English will have problems in Arabic that are invisible until it is rendered.
Digits are a decision of their own: Arabic-Indic numerals and Western numerals are both in use depending on market. Prices, allergen footnote numbers and quantities all need the choice applied consistently.
Dietary information carries more weight
For many Arabic-reading guests, whether a dish contains pork or alcohol is not a preference but a requirement, and it needs to be unambiguous rather than implied. Alcohol used in cooking counts — a sauce finished with wine is not obvious from the dish name.
Halal is a sourcing and handling claim, not a translation. If the menu says it, the supply chain has to support it, and the claim should say what it covers.
Transliterating your own dish names
Brand and signature dish names usually transliterate rather than translate, and the transliteration should be chosen deliberately and then reused everywhere. Guests will search for the spelling they saw; two spellings means two half-strength results.
How Intermenu handles English → Arabic
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 Arabic.
Machine translation produces the first draft; a human reviews before a locale is published, and the review state is recorded per translation.