ROME, Oct 6 ― Headed to Italy for a food-centric vacation that includes mountains of pasta, braised meats, gelato and pizza? A new menu translation app has been launched to help tourists decode a pasta shape from a lamb dish.
Developed for Italophiles who love Italian cuisine, iOS app “Translate A Menu ― Italy Food Dictionary” is a repository of 5,000 Italian food terms meant to help travellers place a restaurant order without fumbling for words or resorting to embarrassing hand gestures.
A “reverse search” will translate food terms from English into Italian to help diners order exactly what they’re craving.
And a notepad feature allows users to create a list of their favourite food ingredients and add photos and map locations of restaurants or markets. The app also works offline.
While a host of translation apps already exist, the app developers say theirs is different because translations will yield accurate culinary results rather than literal phrases.
For example, while the literal translation for osso bucco is “bone hole,” the app knows that the user is looking for the culinary term, which is braised veal shank.
Created for the six million tourists who visit Italy every year, a team of Italian writers took two years to build the culinary dictionary.
Developers are also in the process of creating a culinary translation app for French and Spanish cuisine.
Meanwhile, a pair of developers has also created a handy service meant to rescue sad, desperate, and thirsty travellers from languishing pitifully at the foreign watering hole.
Pivo, which means beer in Czech, offers translations and phonetic pronunciations on how to order a pint of suds in 59 languages.
The Italian Menu app is free to download and includes 15 free searches. The next 15 searches is US$0.99 (RM3.15). ― AFP-Relaxnews
