Menu translation: English to French
The entrée trap runs both ways
Going from English into French, entrée must become plat principal if the English meant a main course. Translating it as entrée puts your main course in the starters section of your own menu. This is the single most common failure in this direction and it survives most automated checks because both words exist in both languages.
Course names generally need to be set deliberately: starter, main and dessert map onto entrée, plat and dessert, and the French sequence carries expectations about pacing that the English does not.
Register and the anglicism question
French menu writing runs more formal and more precise than English menu writing. Casual English copy — “our famous crispy chicken” — translated literally lands as either childish or oddly boastful. Decide how the brand should sound in French rather than letting the tone be an accident of translation.
Some English terms are established in French kitchens and some are not. Cheesecake and brunch travel. Others are better rendered properly, and a menu that reaches for English words it does not need reads as unconsidered to a French guest.
Legal and formatting conventions
French practice expects a comma as the decimal separator and the euro symbol after the amount: 12,50 €. Getting this wrong is small but immediately visible as a foreign menu.
France also applies EU Regulation 1169/2011, so the fourteen allergens must be declarable — the French version of your menu carries the same duty as the original, not a lesser one.
How Intermenu handles English → French
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 French.
Machine translation produces the first draft; a human reviews before a locale is published, and the review state is recorded per translation.