Bitebooker

2 min read

Why an English listing can stay half in Italian

We translate everything we write, and nothing the restaurant writes. That is not laziness: a machine-translated description gets the dishes wrong, and «Cena» is the name of a service, not a word.

This site is in two languages. The pages are the same, the addresses are not — /chi-siamo and /en/about are the same page — and you pick the language at the bottom. Nothing unusual so far.

The part that gets noticed, and that looks like a fault, is another one: open a listing in English and part of the text may stay in Italian. That is deliberate, and there is a single rule.

We translate everything we write. We translate nothing the restaurant writes.

What we write

The labels, the messages, the explanations, the field names, the states of a booking, articles like this one. Everything of ours exists in two hand-written versions, and when one changes the other changes with it.

What the restaurant writes

The description of the place and the names of its services. Those stay as they are.

  • A machine-translated menu gets the dishes wrong, and gets them wrong plausibly: the kind of error nobody corrects because nobody sees it. A rough description of a restaurant is not better than no description — it is worse, because it looks true.
  • «Cena» stays «Cena» in English too. It is not an untranslated word: it is the name that restaurant gave that service, and someone phoning to move the time has to be able to say it.

And if there is no English description?

The page says so, and does not show the Italian one in its place: *«We do not have an English description of this place yet. The address and contacts are here: the rest arrives when the restaurant takes over its listing.»*

It is the same logic as everywhere else on this site: a text in the wrong language, sitting where yours should be, does not inform — it makes the page look broken. Saying that it is missing, and where it will come from, is more useful.

One address per language, not two for the same text

The same article has two different addresses, one per language, and neither answers for the other: an Italian address written with the English slug does not exist. Two addresses for the same text are duplicate content, which is a problem for search and a confusion for whoever shares a link.

Where the listings come from, and why so many still have no description, is in another article.

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