Every page, in 26 languages, without the wait
Switching language used to mean waiting while a machine translated the screen in front of you. We translated the whole product up front instead — 2,080 phrases into 26 languages — so the switch is now a lookup. What that costs and why it is done once for everybody.
Hospitality runs on people who did not grow up speaking the language of the country they are working in. That is true of the kitchens in our own hall, and it is true of most halls in Britain. A till and a back office that only exist in English are a training cost paid every time somebody new starts.
The obvious way, and why it is slow
Our system translates the page rather than the source code. The browser reads the English it is showing, asks for it once, and swaps it in. That decision is what makes "every screen in any language" possible at all — a screen written next month is covered the day it ships, and nobody maintains a list of translation keys.
The cost of it is the first visit. Somebody switching a screen to Polish for the first time waits while a machine translates it. On a big screen that was seconds. On a slow day for the model it was worse, and a tester reported the change taking minutes.
Doing it in advance
The strings we can translate ahead of time are the ones that do not change: buttons, labels, headings, the one-line explanations under a setting. So we collected them — by driving every screen in the product, the till, the guest QR pages, the sign-up flow and the marketing site, and recording exactly what the browser would ask for. That came to 2,080 phrases.
Then we translated all of them into all 26 languages we offer, up front: Spanish, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Arabic, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Tamil, Hindi, Portuguese, Italian, German, French, Dutch, Greek, Ukrainian, Russian, Persian, Somali, Swahili, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Thai and Vietnamese.
Switching language is now a lookup. On a screen whose text is all known, the server spends about 35 milliseconds on it.
What still takes a moment, and why that is right
New text. Add a dish to your QR menu and the first guest to view it in Spanish waits for that dish to be translated — once. It is then stored for everybody, on every device, for good. The second guest, and the second hall, pay nothing.
That is the whole economics of it: a phrase is translated once and read thousands of times. It is what makes the feature affordable rather than a bill per page view.
Two things it deliberately does not do
It does not translate your kitchen's name, your suppliers, your staff or your address — those come back as you typed them, in every language. And a person can correct any translation by hand; a corrected phrase is never overwritten by a machine afterwards.