How many languages should your menu have?
In a tourist area, language is the most expensive part of a menu. Printing in two languages doubles the cost. Printing in five produces a menu nobody can read. Digital removes the cost, but it does not remove the decisions.
Count your guests before you guess
The fastest way to decide which languages to add is not intuition, it is a two-week tally. Ask staff to make a mark on a sheet for each shift, noting the language a foreign guest spoke.
The result is often surprising. A venue that assumed its foreign trade was British discovers most of it is German or Russian. Building the menu from a count beats building it from an impression, every time.
English is rarely enough
English is treated as the default second language, but two large groups fall outside it in Türkiye: Russian-speaking guests, who are heavily represented on the Mediterranean coast, and Arabic-speaking guests, where translation alone does not finish the job — the page itself has to run right to left.
German is worth adding even where English is understood. Guests order more comfortably and ask fewer questions in their own language.
Right-to-left scripts are a separate job
Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Urdu are written right to left. Translating the text is not enough; the direction of the page has to flip.
When it does not:
- Prices end up on the wrong side of item names.
- Arrows and back buttons point the wrong way.
- Time ranges such as "09:00 – 12:00" read backwards, so breakfast hours become unreadable.
Each of these is small. Together they make the menu feel carelessly translated, which leaves a worse impression than not translating at all.
What not to translate
Machine translation fails most often on dish names, because dish names are usually not translated word for word:
- A dish whose name is a proper noun should keep its name. Nobody is looking for "bride soup".
- "Turkish coffee" stays as it is — it is known under that name worldwide.
- Regional dishes keep the original name with one short line underneath explaining what arrives on the plate.
The working rule: keep the proper name, translate the explanation. Two lines per item — the original name on top, one sentence below. This preserves local identity while telling the guest what they are ordering.
Menu language and interface language are different
A digital menu has two layers, and they get confused:
- Content: item names, descriptions, category names. You write these.
- Interface: "Add to cart", "Place order", "Closed" — the system's own words.
You can translate the content into Japanese, but if the cart button is still in Turkish the guest stops halfway. In SiparaQR, content can be entered in 34 languages and you can add a language that is not on the list yourself; the interface is fully translated into five: Turkish, English, German, Russian and Arabic. Right-to-left layout works in Arabic, Persian, Hebrew and Urdu.
How many to start with
Starting well with few languages beats starting badly with many. A half-translated menu tells the guest that nobody paid attention.
A sensible start: your own language plus the top two from the tally, both complete. Add the third once the first two are stable.
Small things that do more work than translation
- Photos. A guest whose language you do not support can still point at a picture. Finishing the photos is higher return than adding a fourth language.
- Icons for spicy, vegetarian, halal. These carry across every language without a word.
- Write the currency. A price reading "180" with no currency creates hesitation, every time.