Menu translation: Italian to English
Pasta shapes are names, not descriptions
Orecchiette, casarecce and strozzapreti should stay in Italian. They are recognised, they are searched for, and the English translations range from unhelpful to unappetising — “little ears”, “priest stranglers”. Where a shape genuinely affects the eating experience, a short descriptor earns its place: “Paccheri — wide tubes that hold a heavy ragù.”
Course structure matters as much as dish names. Antipasto, primo, secondo and contorno are a sequence, and an English-speaking guest who reads primo as “main” will order two starches. Label the sections rather than translating each heading in isolation.
Protected names you should not translate
Parmigiano Reggiano, Prosciutto di Parma, Aceto Balsamico Tradizionale di Modena and Mozzarella di Bufala Campana are protected designations. “Parmesan cheese” is not the same product and, depending on the market, may be a claim you cannot support. Keep the protected name exactly as registered.
Gluten and dairy are close to universal
Wheat and dairy run through most of the Italian repertoire, which makes per-item allergen tagging more valuable here than almost anywhere else — a guest avoiding gluten needs to find the handful of dishes that work, quickly, without reading forty descriptions.
Watch anchovy in particular. It appears in puttanesca, in many vitello tonnato preparations and in some Caesar-style dressings, and it is a fish allergen in dishes that read as vegetarian.
How Intermenu handles Italian → 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.