Menu translation: English to Spanish
Decide which Spanish before you translate
Peninsular and Latin American Spanish diverge exactly where food vocabulary lives. Prawns are gambas in Spain and camarones across much of Latin America; a potato is patata or papa; juice is zumo or jugo. Neither is wrong, but a menu that mixes them has no consistent voice.
Pick the market you actually serve — the tourists in front of you, not the largest speaker population — and hold the vocabulary consistently across the whole menu.
Formatting conventions to get right
Spanish uses a comma as the decimal separator and places the euro symbol after the amount: 12,50 €. Questions and exclamations open with inverted marks. Capitalisation is lighter than English — dish names do not take title case.
These are small, but collectively they are what makes a menu read as written in Spanish rather than translated into it.
Allergen wording is regulated in Spain
Spain applies EU Regulation 1169/2011, so the fourteen allergens must be declarable for unpackaged food. The Spanish menu carries the same obligation as the original.
Keep allergens as structured tags on the item rather than as translated sentences, so filtering works in every locale and a change made once propagates everywhere.
How Intermenu handles English → Spanish
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 Spanish.
Machine translation produces the first draft; a human reviews before a locale is published, and the review state is recorded per translation.