Menu Translations

Menus in restaurants in Spain can be dangerous.

Not because of the food but because of the language used; there’s often a real risk of choking with laughter at the typically terrible translations into English.

 

Photo by Sue Burke

More seriously, badly-translated menus are a danger to profits and to a restaurant’s reputation. Confusing the customers will not make them happy, and bad reviews can spread very quickly on the internet. Despite this, many Barcelona restuarants still rely on Google Translate or a waiter ‘who once spent a month in Londres’  and end up with customers laughing at them, ordering the wrong thing or even walking out. I have even written a blog post on the subject.

If you know a restaurant that could use the translation services of a professional food writer to create Spanish to English or Catalan to English translations then please do them a favour and direct them towards my copywriting, journalism and translation website…