The rota in the language your kitchen actually reads

Walk the back of a food hall and you will hear four or five first languages before you reach the last kitchen. The guest-facing menu getting translated is table stakes now. The part that is usually left in English is the part the staff live in: the rota, the clock-in, the shift they are trying to read before service.

There is a heavy way to do this — mark every string in the app with a key, keep a translation file per language, and spend weeks you do not have keeping them in sync. And there is the way that actually ships: translate the page itself. The app reads the English a screen is showing, asks for that text in the chosen language, caches the answer for everybody, and rewrites the screen. Pick Somali or Turkish once and every screen after it is in that language, because the app is translating what it draws rather than looking up what someone remembered to key.

The one honest catch

Because it translates what it sees, the very first time a screen is opened in a new language it has to fetch the words it has not seen before — so for a second, on that first visit, a fresh screen can show English before it settles. Every visit after is instant, because the answer is cached and shared. The fix for the first visit is to warm the common furniture — the navigation, the menu of screens — ahead of time, so the parts every screen is reached through are already translated before anyone arrives.

What is never translated, on purpose

Some things must stay exactly as typed. A dish name, a venue name, a person's name, a price, an account reference — translating any of those is not helpfulness, it is a wrong order or a wrong payee. So the same rule that decides what to translate decides, more importantly, what to leave alone: language gets translated; names, money and codes do not.