The Best Languages to Add (based on your city’s visitors)

Adding 10 languages sounds helpful—until you’re maintaining 10 versions during price changes, seasonal updates, and item swaps. More languages can actually create more mismatches and more “wrong info” moments. A smarter approach is to pick the highest-impact languages based on your real visitors (hotel neighborhoods, tour routes, airport flows, seasonal tourism, and your typical customer questions). This page sits inside the main guide Menu Translation & Localization for Tourists (Beyond “Multilingual Menu”) because “more languages” is only valuable if you can keep them accurate.

Every extra language adds ongoing operational work: you’re not just translating once—you’re syncing changes forever. The risk isn’t only cost; it’s credibility. Tourists forgive small grammar issues. They don’t forgive wrong ingredients, wrong prices, or mismatched dish details across languages. One “that’s not what the menu said” moment is enough to kill trust and produce bad reviews.

So the goal here is ROI languages: the smallest set of languages that covers the biggest share of your visitors with the least maintenance pain.

You don’t need a huge analytics stack to do this well. You need signals. Start with:

Where do your tourists come from? (listen to accents, look at tour groups, check nearby hotels)

When do they come? (seasonal peaks change language mix)

What questions do they ask most? (“spicy?”, “contains pork?”, “what is this?”)

Then validate your assumptions with public data sources. If you operate in Europe, your baseline view of inbound demand can be grounded in Eurostat’s tourism statistics on nights spent and (when you want raw filters) the Eurostat tourism databrowser. These don’t tell you “which languages,” but they help you confirm which markets dominate inbound travel patterns. European Commission+1

For a broader, global view (especially useful if you’re outside the EU or you get long-haul tourists), use the UN Tourism inbound tourism country profile dashboard or the wider UN Tourism data dashboard. untourism.int+1

Instead of adding languages randomly, pick them like this:

Tier A — The bridge language (almost always English)English is your “universal fallback” for mixed tourist traffic. Even when it’s not a guest’s first language, it often reduces friction enough to order.

Tier B — Your top 1–2 visitor marketsThese depend on your city. Think in practical flows: airport routes, package tourism corridors, and nearby countries that travel frequently. (A restaurant in Vienna will likely have a different Tier B than a restaurant in Sharm El-Sheikh or Barcelona.)

Tier C — High-impact niche languageThis is where smart ROI shows up: one additional language that solves a real problem for your guests. Examples:

Arabic (if you host many family travelers from Arabic-speaking countries)

Russian (in certain resort destinations)

Chinese/Japanese/Korean (where you have concentrated tour groups)

Italian/French/German/Spanish depending on regional travel patterns

The trick: only add Tier C if you can maintain it.

Your best language decisions often come from your menu’s pain points, not from general tourism stats.

Add a language faster if:

Staff repeatedly explain the same dishes to a specific group

Guests commonly misunderstand ingredients (allergens, pork/alcohol, spice level)

You have many “local cultural dishes” with unfamiliar terms

And here’s the key: a bad translation is worse than no translation. If you can’t maintain a language properly, don’t add it yet—because mismatches cause distrust. If you want the practical guardrails that prevent these mistakes, use How to Avoid Bad Translations That Kill Trust.

Tourists search before they arrive: “best breakfast near me,” “traditional food,” “halal restaurant,” “vegetarian options,” and so on. You can use Google Trends to compare interest by region and season, and the official help docs on comparing search terms and exploring interest by region to avoid misreading the charts. Google Help+2Google Help+2

This doesn’t replace real visitor observation—but it helps you catch obvious misses (for example, a city that sees strong seasonal spikes from one market).

Language selection is not only marketing—it’s operations. Before adding a language, define:

Who updates translations when prices change?

What happens to seasonal items (daily specials, “market price,” limited dishes)?

How do you prevent “English updated / German forgotten” drift?

A simple rule that prevents chaos:Don’t add a language unless you can update it within the same workflow as your base menu.That’s how you avoid translation bloat.

Arabic can be extremely valuable in many destinations, but it also introduces layout and directionality considerations (RTL, mixed numbers, mixed Latin names). If your menu is digital, you’ll want to be aware of web layout requirements like W3C’s Arabic & Persian Layout Requirements and its publication background, because “correct words” can still render confusingly if the layout is wrong. W3C+1This is another reason the “fewer, better languages” strategy wins: you can do each language properly.

Add a language if all are true:

You see consistent visitor demand for it (staff observation + tourism/search signals)

It reduces ordering friction (fewer questions, fewer misunderstandings)

You can maintain it with every update (prices, swaps, seasons)

You can QA key items (top sellers + allergy-sensitive items)

If any of these are “no,” don’t add it yet. Improve the languages you already have first.

Most restaurants get the best results with 2–4 languages done well rather than 10 languages done badly. Start with English + your top visitor market(s). After a month, measure:

fewer “what is this?” questions

higher sales of signature dishes

fewer misunderstandings and complaints

Then add one more language only if it clearly pays for itself.