Menu translation: English to Japanese
Three scripts, used for different jobs
Japanese writes with kanji, hiragana and katakana together, and the choice is meaningful. Foreign dish names conventionally take katakana — ステーキ for steak, パスタ for pasta — while Japanese ingredients and preparations use kanji or hiragana. A menu that renders everything in one script reads as machine output.
Line breaking follows different rules too. Japanese text wraps between characters rather than at spaces, and certain characters cannot begin or end a line. Check the rendered menu rather than the translated text.
Describe the dish for a reader who has not met it
Dishes that need no explanation in English often need one in Japanese. A Japanese-reading guest may not know what goes into a Caesar salad, a shepherd’s pie or a club sandwich. The useful translation names the dish and then says what is in it, in the order a Japanese menu would normally give.
Japan’s allergen list is not the EU list
Japan mandates a specific set of raw materials — including buckwheat and walnut, which sit outside the EU fourteen — and does not mirror the EU list item for item. A menu translated for Japanese guests but tagged against EU allergens alone can be simultaneously accurate in Europe and incomplete in Japan.
Where you serve both markets, tag against the union of the lists and let each locale surface what applies. See the allergen reference pages for the per-country detail.
How Intermenu handles English → Japanese
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 Japanese.
Machine translation produces the first draft; a human reviews before a locale is published, and the review state is recorded per translation.