Menu translation: English to Italian
Do not translate what is already Italian
English menus are full of Italian words used loosely, and translating them back produces errors. “Panini” is already plural — a single sandwich is a panino. “Latte” ordered in Italy gets you a glass of milk. “Pepperoni” means large peppers, not salami.
The fix is to translate from the dish rather than the English word: record what is actually served and name it correctly in Italian, even where that means departing from the English wording a guest is used to.
Course structure carries expectations
An Italian-reading guest expects antipasto, primo, secondo and contorno to mean something about sequence and size. Dropping an English menu structure directly into Italian section headings tends to produce a primo that is plated as a main and a contorno nobody realises must be ordered separately. Set the sections to match how the food is actually served.
Protected names and gendered agreement
If the kitchen uses Parmigiano Reggiano or Prosciutto di Parma, name them exactly; if it uses a generic hard cheese, do not borrow the protected name in translation. This is both a legal and a credibility question in the Italian market.
Italian also inflects adjectives for gender and number, so a description assembled from fragments — a name here, a modifier there — will produce agreement errors that read immediately as machine output. Translate whole phrases.
How Intermenu handles English → Italian
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 Italian.
Machine translation produces the first draft; a human reviews before a locale is published, and the review state is recorded per translation.