Not just language but culture plays a key role when communicating with people from around the world. In Asia it is very common for people to be in agreement with you especially when asking pointed questions. “Are you sure this food has no peanuts?” could be a dangerous question. The answer could be “yes” but the person answering may not understand the question or worse think you are asking for peanuts.  In cases were English is not understood I personally have stuck to foods that I’m familiar with.

What are your experiences?

To date 11 languages have been translated.  The languages chosen are based on what is available to me from friends and colleges. Strangely Spanish, French and German have yet to be completed. I consider these core languages that the site need and hope to have them up before July.

The quality of the languages I believe is high quality. I base this on three areas.

1. Many people I talk to say they know the language I’m looking to translate but few are confident to display there work publicly on the web site. All the people so far translating have fluent capabilities as well as a background demonstrating they proficiency.
2. Although not scientific, I have tested at restaurants the Chinese, Thai, Mala and Korean translations. In each case the waiter understood the translation. How do I know? They also spoke English.

What languages do you feel are important to have?

This has and continues to be a project that is intended to be a free service to the food allergy sufferers everywhere. The combination of gathering translations using them to test the site and then developing the site with Calcey has been a lot of fun and I look forward to it becoming mainstream.

About the architecture.

The site dynamically pull image files to a printable web page.  This is done so people do not need to add font support for non-western languages.