Online Menu Translation Service feeds Restaurants’ Multilingual needs

A few weeks ago, a new online translation service saw the light of day. Its goal? Enabling restaurants to create multilingual menus in a snap!

The new service, www.menumultitool.com, is an online service aimed at restaurants that sell to foreign customers; it can create menus in ten of the most common languages in the world. The only thing the programme needs is a menu in the restaurant’s native language.

Menumultitool has both a free and a paid option. When restaurants can use the service for free, which means the translations they are presented with are derived from Google Translate. They can also have their menu translated by a translation agency, which involves an additional fee. The translations appear to be on separate pages, but the translated menus are a single document with full inter-synchronisation functionality. This means that if an alteration in for example the price is made in one of the languages, the information will also be altered in the other languages as well.

The new service is being greeted with open arms by the restaurant trade.

Ina Polanska is manager at the Cha Dao in Tallinn, Estonia. “Located in the touristic centre, our restaurant had to make three individual menus: Estonian, English, and Russian all saved as separate documents in Microsoft Word,” she says. “Updating dishes in the menu became a real nightmare. Ensuring no mistakes were made in pricing and description for multiple languages was difficult and time-consuming.

Professional translation services refused to involve themselves just for the sake of the names of a couple of dishes. With menu multitool tasks like this now take mere minutes. To help increase desirability and get ahead of the competition we plan to add more languages to the menu, after all with this new service it’s so easy.”

Next to translations, Menumultitool also offers several other services for restaurants;

•    A catalogue of global cuisine available in which the translation of the dishes is stated in six different European languages;
•    Text-editing software that is tailored to menu creation
•    A database with menu designs and layouts of which all aspects can be customised;
•    A pre-set conversion rate to support multiple currencies;
•    Options with which multiple prices can be set for one single dish.