Menu translation: French to English
Technique words that English borrowed but changed
English has absorbed a great deal of French kitchen vocabulary, which creates a false sense of safety. Confit, sauté, gratin and flambé all survive intact. But entrée means starter in French and main course in American English — the single most expensive mistranslation on a menu, because it puts the guest at the wrong course.
Sauce names are effectively proper nouns and should stay: béarnaise, beurre blanc, velouté. What English readers need is not a translation but a base: “Beurre blanc — butter and white wine reduction.” That one clause also discloses dairy and alcohol without a separate sentence.
Cuts and doneness do not map cleanly
French butchery divides the animal differently from British or American butchery, so onglet, bavette and paleron have no exact equivalent. Naming the nearest cut plus the cooking method serves the guest better than an invented English name that will not match what arrives.
Doneness is a genuine safety and satisfaction issue. Bleu, saignant, à point and bien cuit do not line up with rare / medium-rare / medium / well done, and à point in particular sits closer to medium-rare than to medium. Setting the mapping explicitly per locale avoids a steak going back.
Allergens hiding in the classics
Classical French cooking is built on butter, cream, egg and wheat, often in the sauce rather than the named component. A dish described only as “duck breast, cherry” may still involve a butter-mounted sauce and a flour-thickened jus. Tag the allergens on the item; do not rely on the description carrying them.
How Intermenu handles French → English
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 English.
Machine translation produces the first draft; a human reviews before a locale is published, and the review state is recorded per translation.