Menu translation: Spanish to English
One word, several dishes
Spanish food vocabulary varies sharply by region and country, and a single term can mean different things on either side of the Atlantic. Tortilla is a potato omelette in Spain and a flatbread in Mexico. Bizcocho, torta and pastel all shift meaning by country. Translating from the word alone, without knowing which kitchen wrote the menu, produces confident and wrong English.
The practical rule is to translate from the dish, not the noun: record what is actually served, then name it in English. Keep the Spanish name alongside — guests who know it will look for it.
Sharing formats need explaining, not translating
Tapas, raciones and medias raciones describe portion size and social format, not a category of food. English-speaking guests routinely under- or over-order because nothing on the menu tells them a ración is meant for the table. A single line — “Raciones are full plates, designed to share” — prevents more complaints than any individual dish translation.
Seafood and pork are the allergen pressure points
Spanish menus are dense with crustaceans, molluscs and cured pork, and the allergen exposure is often in a garnish or stock rather than the headline. Sofrito, picada and seafood stocks carry shellfish into dishes that do not name it.
Record these as structured allergen tags per item. A guest filtering for crustaceans needs the filter to catch the dish whose only shellfish is in the base.
How Intermenu handles Spanish → 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.