Digital Menus

How to Run a Multilingual Restaurant Menu

By Thmenu Team · Published 21 October 2026 · Updated 31 October 2026 · Reviewed by Kerim Sağlam, Founder, Synaltix LLC — approved for publication in bulk (owner decision 2026-11-06)

A multilingual restaurant menu shows each guest the same menu in a language they read well. On paper that means a thick menu or a separate card per language; on a digital menu it means one menu that opens in the language of the guest's phone, with a way to switch. The hard part is not the words but the details: dish names that should stay as they are, allergens that must be exactly right, and keeping every language current when the menu changes.

Which languages to offer

• Start with the languages your guests actually speak — ask your staff which ones they hear most.
• Add the languages of nearby hotels, stations or attractions if your guests come from them.
• On a digital menu, another language adds no pages; on paper, every language does.
• Right-to-left languages, such as Arabic or Hebrew, need a layout that reads right to left — not just translated text.

What to translate, and what to keep

Allergens are not a translation exercise

In the European Union, allergen information must be provided for food sold without prepackaging, such as restaurant dishes (Regulation (EU) No 1169/2011, Article 44), and mandatory food information has to appear in a language easily understood by consumers where the food is sold (Article 15). A mistranslated allergen is a safety problem, not a matter of style. Use fixed, reviewed names for each allergen in each language instead of translating them freely, and check the ingredients a translation mentions.

Allergens on a digital menu in general: how to create a digital menu.

Machine translation, used carefully

• Machine translation is a fast first draft, especially for descriptions.
• Ask a native speaker — a member of staff, or a regular — to read the languages you serve most.
• Watch for ingredients that change in translation: one fruit becoming another matters to a guest with an allergy.
• Translate again when you change a dish, so the languages do not drift apart.

Automatic translation works best as a background job rather than something a guest waits for. The menu is translated once, the result is stored, and every guest who opens the menu in that language reads the same text. You then have time to read it before it matters, and a new dish only needs translating once.

How guests switch language

A good multilingual menu opens in the language of the guest's phone and shows a language picker where the guest can find it, with each language written in its own name — "Deutsch", not "German".

Approximate prices in the guest's currency

A visitor reading a price in an unfamiliar currency often converts it in their head. A digital menu can do the arithmetic for them: the guest picks a currency and sees each price converted at a published exchange rate. That converted figure is a reference, not a price you charge.

• The bill, the payment and your accounts stay in your currency. The guest pays in your currency and the transaction settles in your currency.
• If the guest pays by card, the amount their own bank charges in their currency is set by the bank and its exchange rate, which can differ from the figure on the menu.
• Use an official reference rate and say where it comes from. The European Central Bank publishes euro reference rates, usually once each working day, and says they are published for information purposes only and that using them for transactions is strongly discouraged.
• Show your own currency by default, so the price on the menu matches the price on the bill unless the guest chooses otherwise.

Being found by visitors from abroad: restaurant local SEO.

A multilingual menu with Thmenu

Thmenu's guest menu opens in the language the phone is set to and offers a language picker, with each language in its own name; right-to-left languages are laid out right to left. The names of the 14 EU allergens come from fixed, reviewed wording in each language rather than from the translation model, and a check flags translations that change what an ingredient is.

Translation runs in the background

• You write the menu once and choose the languages to translate into on the Translations page of the panel. The request goes into a queue, and the translation continues in the background, so you can close the page.
• Dish names, descriptions and categories are translated. The Translations page shows how much of each language is done and whether its job is queued, running, retrying or failed.
• Translation has a daily budget. A large menu in many languages is finished over several runs rather than all at once, and the page shows the progress.
• By default only missing items are translated. Turn on "Overwrite existing translations" to translate everything again, for example after you rewrite descriptions.
• When you add dishes with the AI Menu Generator, the new dishes are queued for the languages your menu already has.
• Translations are produced by an AI model, so read the languages your guests use most. Editing a single translation by hand is not available in the panel yet; correct the original text and translate again.

Prices in another currency, for reference

Guests can open the currency button on the menu and pick another currency; the menu starts in yours. The dish prices are then shown converted at the euro reference rates of the European Central Bank, which Thmenu reads through the Frankfurter rates service. The picker offers a fixed list of currencies with yours first; a currency without a current rate from that service is shown grayed out and cannot be picked. The converted price is for display only: the cart, the bill and any payment stay in your currency, the guest pays in your currency, and the transaction settles in your currency.

See the multilingual menu in Thmenu.