Translating Your Menu

If your restaurant is in a diverse area — tourists, expats, mixed communities — a single-language menu leaves money on the table. Customers who can read the menu in their own language order more confidently, try more dishes, and come back more often. Lekro lets you offer your whole menu in more than one language, and even drafts the translations for you with AI.

This guide covers the three pieces: choosing your languages, translating dishes one at a time, and translating the entire menu in one pass.

How Bilingual Menus Work

Every piece of customer-facing text in Lekro can hold a value per language:

• Category names
• Item names and descriptions
• Modifier titles and choices

When a customer opens your website, they see the menu in their browser’s preferred language, and they can switch languages at any time from a toggle on the site. Behind the scenes, each field simply stores one value per language — so “Margherita Pizza” and “بيتزا مارغريتا” are the same item, shown to different people.

Choosing Your Languages

First, tell Lekro which languages your site supports. Go to Settings → Business Profile → Regional, and find the Website Languages card:

• Click + Add to add a language.
• Click the star on a language to make it your default — the one you’ll write in first, and the fallback when a translation is missing.
• Remove a language with the trash icon (you can’t remove the default).

Once both languages are listed here, translation fields appear throughout the menu builder.

Translating Item by Item

When you open any category, item, or modifier, its editor includes a translation block with a tab per language. This is where you control every word by hand — ideal for small menus or dishes that need a careful touch.

1. Write the name and description on the default-language tab first.
2. Switch to the other language’s tab and either type the translation yourself, or click AI Translate to draft it from the default text in one click.
3. Review and tweak the wording, then save the item.

The AI Translate button gives you a strong first draft instantly; you stay in control and can edit anything before saving.

Translating the Whole Menu at Once

For a large menu, translating dishes one by one takes a while. The Auto-Translate All button in the menu toolbar translates everything in a single pass. Click it to open the Translate Menu dialog:

1. Choose the direction with From and To (e.g. English → Arabic).
2. Tick what to translate: Categories, Menu Items, and for items whether to include Titles, Descriptions, or both.
3. Click Start Translation.

Lekro fills in every selected field that doesn’t already have a translation, giving you a complete bilingual menu in seconds. It’s a starting point — review the results and refine anything that needs a human touch.

Tip: Run Auto-Translate All once to cover the whole menu, then fine-tune individual dishes in their editors afterward.

Tips for Better Translations

• Adapt, don’t translate literally. “Chicken on a bed of rice” may read more naturally as a different phrasing in Arabic.
• Keep descriptions short. One or two sentences per item get read; long ones get skipped in any language.
• Use everyday food terms your customers actually say, not formal or literary language.
• Leave well-known names alone. Dishes like shawarma or fattoush already have established names; some imported dishes read better transliterated than translated.

Note: Translations don’t re-sync automatically. If you edit a dish’s default-language text later, update the other language too (by hand or with AI Translate).

What Your Customers See

On your live website, customers get a language toggle in the header. Switching languages re-renders the whole menu — category names, item names, descriptions, and modifier options — and flips the layout to right-to-left for Arabic, with fonts tuned for Arabic script, so everything reads naturally.

What’s Next?

Your menu is now fully built and multilingual. Explore Reservations, your Gallery, and Reviews to round out your restaurant’s digital experience.