Building a five-language menu isn't a translation job
We opened the Aurea menu up to five languages. Translation was the easy part. The real work was text length, currency and the page flipping direction.
The QR menu platform we built for hotels and restaurants runs in five languages: Turkish, English, Russian, Arabic and German. "Five languages" makes people think of translation. Translation was the easiest part.
## Arabic flips the page
Arabic reads right to left. That isn't just a text-alignment change. The price on a menu card moves to the left, back arrows reverse, the category strip flows the other way, icons mirror.
Try to add it afterwards and you'll be fixing every screen one at a time. Account for it from the start and it's almost free. This is not a decision to postpone.
## Text isn't the same length
A Turkish dish description can get noticeably longer in German. If you build the design tightly around the Turkish text, cards overflow in the German version or the copy gets cut off with an ellipsis.
There's no clever fix: leave room for the longest language, and don't build the layout on fixed heights.
## Currency follows the language, not the country
This is easy to get backwards at the start. Wherever a guest's phone is registered, someone opening the Russian menu wants to see roubles. Storing the price in one base currency and converting it at display time produces fewer mistakes than entering a price per language — and when prices go up, you update one place.
## A missing translation shouldn't mean a blank space
The venue adds a new dish and only writes the Turkish. What should a guest browsing the Russian menu see?
Not an empty line. Untranslated fields fall back to the default language. The guest never sees a gap, and the venue never feels it can't publish until every dish exists in five languages.
## Dim it, don't hide it
Guests can set dietary preferences: gluten-free, vegan, vegetarian, nut-free, dairy-free, halal. The obvious move is to hide the dishes that don't fit.
We dimmed them instead. Guests want to see what they can't have too — to recommend it to the person across the table, or to ask whether there's a gluten-free version. Shortening the menu doesn't help the guest; it just hides information.
## In short
A multilingual product isn't a single-language product times five. It's a different product. Make the decisions early and the cost stays small; leave them until later and you'll be reopening every screen.