Menu translation: English to Chinese
Simplified or Traditional is a market decision
Simplified characters serve mainland China and Singapore; Traditional serves Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. They are not interchangeable, and publishing one to an audience that reads the other is immediately noticeable. Choose by where your guests actually come from.
Conversion between the two is not purely mechanical either — some food vocabulary differs beyond the characters themselves, so a converted menu still wants a read-through.
Name the dish so it can be ordered
Western dishes often have an established Chinese name already in circulation, and inventing a new one makes the dish harder to order and harder to search for. Where no established name exists, describe by main ingredient and cooking method — that is the convention a Chinese menu already follows.
Text length also drops sharply: Chinese conveys in a few characters what English needs a line for. Layouts tuned to English line lengths tend to look sparse, and the fix is a design pass rather than padded translation.
Say what the heat and the dairy are doing
Spice tolerance and expectation vary widely, and “mild” is not a shared reference point. Where a dish is chilli-hot, say so specifically rather than relying on a symbol.
Dairy deserves particular attention: lactose intolerance is common across much of East Asia, and Western menus use butter, cream and cheese in places a Chinese-reading guest would not predict. Tag it on the item so the filter catches it.
How Intermenu handles English → Chinese
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 Chinese.
Machine translation produces the first draft; a human reviews before a locale is published, and the review state is recorded per translation.