Tips for Multilingual Menus

A multilingual menu plays a very important role in driving the success of a restaurant or hotel. Our top tips and tricks for designing an effective multilingual menu help hotels and restaurants to drive business through accurate translation, mouthwatering international texts and attractive design.

Invest in Design

A well-designed menu should be as attractive as your food and reflect the style of your restaurant or hotel. Remember that the look and feel of a menu will give an immediate impression. This can be the difference between securing a sale or losing potential business.

Invest in a Professional Translation

Well-translated multilingual menus help to attract guests, influence sales and drive repeat business. Good translations can be the difference between a popular venue and somewhere that tourists walk by sniggering or uninspired.

Use Images

A picture is worth a thousand words. This is particularly true for food and a massive opportunity for restaurants. How many times have you sat in a restaurant and been tempted away from your initial choice because you’ve seen something delicious being brought to the table next to you? Or stopped at a restaurant just because the food being served looks so good?

Design your menus to include photos of your dishes. It is important that these photos are of a high quality and have a professional appearance. These photos will support the translation of your dishes to help guests make a choice that they will be delighted with.

Photos should of course accurately reflect what guests will be served. Don’t raise guests’ expectations of portion sizes or presentation with a beautiful image that you cannot match with each and every meal served in your restaurant.

List Specialities

Remember that many tourists will never have heard of the local specialities. Even a menu that is perfectly translated into their native language can appear foreign when listing dishes that they are not accustomed to. Help tourists get a true taste of a place with added guidance and information about local and regional specialities. Describe not only what they are, but also how they are prepared, how they are served and how they will taste.

Thanks for reading our tips and tricks for designing a multilingual menu. If you have any feedback or great ideas, we’d love it hear about it!

Are you still not convinced that you need a multilingual menu? You are not alone! Many hotels and restaurants in tourist destinations like Innsbruck in Austria overlook the importance of designing an effective multilingual menu. And as a result, they lose business with badly translated or monolingual menus. Read our article on why to invest in a multilingual menu for more information about why a multilingual menu is important for your hotel or restaurant.