The worst menu translations do not come from poor English. They come from trying too hard: somebody translates the name instead of describing it.
So a guest orders "Hunter's Stew", the server has no idea what that is, and nobody in the kitchen has ever called bigos anything but bigos. In the extreme version — still visible on menus across Europe — a Polish herring dish becomes "follow in oil", because the machine read śledź as an imperative verb.
Below is the rule that removes most of those, and a method for building your own list in an afternoon.
The rule: the name stays, the description is added
A guest who came to Spain wants to eat fabada, not "Asturian bean stew". A guest in Poland wants pierogi, not "Polish dumplings". The dish name is what they point at, say to the server and type into a phone afterwards. Replace it and you take away their handle on the meal.
The format that works:
Żurek 24 zł
Sour rye soup with white sausage and egg
Original name on the dish line, one sentence of description underneath in smaller type. The description answers two questions: what it is and what is in it. Nothing else.
Three groups that never get translated
- Traditional dish names — bigos, żurek, fabada, cassoulet, ribollita, Sauerbraten. The name is the dish.
- EU protected designations — oscypek, manchego, Prosciutto di Parma, Roquefort, Kalamata. These are protected in law; translating them is not a style choice but an error.
- House and brand names — "The Chef's Board", "Grandma's Set". They stay, however odd they read abroad.
What the description has to get right
Name what could surprise. Offal, blood, sour flavours, raw beef, pork. A guest who discovers it at the table leaves the plate and a review; one who reads it and orders anyway is exactly the guest you wanted.
"Stew" on its own says nothing. It covers everything braised. It starts working only with two ingredients next to it — pork and cabbage stew, bean and chorizo stew.
Watch the false friends. Ham means boiled ham to most English speakers, so cured ham needs saying: cured ham, aged 24 months. Buckwheat is not porridge. A breaded pork chop is not a cutlet in everyday English.
Say how it arrives. Served warm, for sharing, carved at the table, some of them hot. Half the questions a server answers are about form, not ingredients.
Building your own list in an afternoon
You do not need a dictionary of the national cuisine. You need your own menu.
- Take the 20 best-selling dishes. They are most of the turnover, and the ones a guest is most likely to ask about.
- Write one sentence each, answering what it is and what is in it. Do it in your own language first, then translate the sentence — not the name.
- Read the 20 sentences aloud in sequence. Repeated openings ("Traditional dish of…", "Classic…") appear immediately, and they are what makes a menu read like a machine wrote it.
- Check the machine's first ten. If you started from automatic translation, review the first ten by hand and note what kind of error it makes — the same error will be in the other fifty.
- Give the file to a server who works the floor. They know which dishes get asked about, and their list will not match yours.
Keeping it from going stale
A dictionary kept in a separate document drifts from the menu within 3 months: a dish changes, the menu is updated and nobody opens the translations file.
The version that survives is the same one that works for allergens — the description lives next to the dish, where the price and the ingredients already are. A recipe change is one edit, not two. And when a dish leaves the menu, its translation leaves with it, without anybody having to remember.
How many languages you actually need, and how to find out, is in how many languages does your menu need. How it looks assembled is on the multilingual menu page.
Frequently asked questions
Should the dish name be translated or left alone?
Left alone. The original name is what the guest points at, orders and searches for afterwards. One sentence of description goes underneath in their language.
What about protected designations?
Never translated. Manchego, oscypek, Roquefort and Prosciutto di Parma are protected names — translating them confuses the guest and strips the legal meaning.
Is machine translation good enough for a menu?
For the description, as a starting point. For the dish name, no — that is where "follow in oil" comes from. Review the first ten by hand and you will see the pattern of errors the system makes.
How long should a description be?
One sentence. What it is and what is in it. Longer starts competing with the guest's decision instead of helping it.
What about offal and unusual ingredients?
Name them plainly: tripe, blood sausage, pig's ear. Concealment costs you the plate and the review; clarity costs you the guests who were never going to order it anyway.
