How do I serve guests who don't speak English?

Roughly one guest in four in the United States grew up speaking something other than English at home, and about four in ten of those say they speak English less than "very well." You serve them by taking the guesswork out of three things they cannot easily ask you about — what is in a dish, how big it is, and whether it is safe for them — and by making it easy for them to tell you, in their own language, when something is wrong. Most of that costs nothing. The rest costs less than a reprint.

How many of my guests don't speak English well?

More than you probably count. The Census Bureau's five-year American Community Survey for 2017–2021 found that 22% of people age 5 and older spoke a language other than English at home — more than 500 individual languages and language groups — and that 62% of those people also spoke English "very well" (U.S. Census Bureau, June 3, 2025). The remaining 38% did not. USAFacts' tabulation of the 2024 one-year survey puts the share at 23%, about 74.1 million people, with 60.9% speaking English very well (USAFacts, from Census ACS 2024).

The people who would struggle to read your menu are a smaller, still large group. The Migration Policy Institute counted 25.9 million people who were "limited English proficient" — 9% of everyone age 5 and older — in the 2015 survey, with Spanish accounting for 64% of them, followed by Chinese (7%), Vietnamese (3%), Korean (2%) and Tagalog (2%); California's share was 19% of the state's population, Texas and New York 14% each (Migration Policy Institute). Those are national figures. On your block the mix is whatever your block is, and the only honest way to know it is to listen to what is spoken at your own tables for a week.

Are international visitors coming back?

Slowly, and fewer than the industry had hoped. The National Travel and Tourism Office's Spring 2026 forecast puts 2025 international arrivals at 68.3 million, with 70.5 million forecast for 2026 (up 3.2%) and 74.1 million for 2027; Canada, Mexico, France, Germany, Italy, the United Kingdom, China, India, Japan, South Korea, Australia and Brazil together supplied 77.2% of 2025 arrivals (NTTO Spring 2026 Forecast, April 2026). The same office had forecast 77.1 million for 2025 a year earlier (NTTO, March 18, 2025), so the year came in roughly nine million visitors short of its own projection. Spending held up better than headcount: international visitors spent more than $250.2 billion on U.S. travel and tourism in 2025, down 0.6% on 2024 (NTTO, December 2025 International Visitor Spending).

For a single restaurant the national number matters less than the local one. The Georgia Municipal Association estimated 500,000 visitors for Atlanta's World Cup matches, and a local hospitality consultancy did the arithmetic every owner should do: "Let's assume each visitor eats just three restaurant meals while they're in town. That's 1,500,000 dining occasions," some of them by people "who might not speak English" (RO Hospitality, May 2026). Swap in your own event, convention or cruise-ship calendar.

What actually goes wrong when a guest can't read the menu?

They stop reading names and start hunting for facts — and they hunt on their phones, not with your server. A 2026 Carnegie Mellon / Indiana University study of international students and new immigrants ordering in U.S. restaurants found that 11 of 13 interview participants wanted information about dish size, more than half wanted flavor details such as spiciness, and "when names were opaque, participants redirected attention to descriptions and ingredient lists." Every one of the 13 "described switching among multiple tools within a single ordering episode" — Google Search, translation software, review apps — and the researchers named a specific failure, "name-continuity failure": having worked out what they wanted on a phone, guests could not find the same dish again on the paper menu and sometimes needed waitstaff to bridge the gap (Zhang & Chen, arXiv 2604.19088).

Translation itself is where menus break. Food writers and translators interviewed by Atlas Obscura describe why: some dishes simply have no equivalent word, "food information is something that is startlingly hard to convey across cultures, because there's a lot packed into it," and restaurants cannot "get a professional translator every time a new dish comes out of the kitchen" (Atlas Obscura, January 24, 2018). The result is the familiar "chicken in her juice." The guest does not laugh; the guest guesses.

Is the language gap a food-safety problem?

Yes, and it is the part to fix first. Guests with severe allergies already hold back from asking. In a 2020 Food Control study of 39 consumers with severe food allergies, participants described fearing being seen as "fussy" or "a nuisance," and said a trustworthy exchange depended on staff knowing what was in the food and understanding allergies, alongside evidence of genuine care (Barnett, Vasileiou & Lucas, 2020). Now put that guest in their second language, across a counter, at the rush. The question that was hard to ask in English often does not get asked at all.

U.S. law recognizes nine major food allergens — milk, eggs, fish, crustacean shellfish, tree nuts, peanuts, wheat, soybeans and, since January 1, 2023, sesame (FDA). Nine words, per dish, is a small table. It is also the one piece of your menu that should never be machine-translated and left unchecked: a flipped negation ("contains no nuts" rendered as its opposite) is the kind of error that can pass unnoticed in a machine translation. Have that one table translated by a person, or keep it as a symbol grid that needs no translation at all.

Should I translate my menu, and into which languages?

Translate descriptions, keep dish names. Guests in the study above were not helped by a translated name; they were helped by a plain account of what is in the dish, how big it is and how hot it is. A name in your own language plus a one-line description in the guest's is what both the research and the translators point to.

Pick languages from your own room, not a national list. Start with the languages you actually hear (for most U.S. neighborhoods that means Spanish first, per the Census and MPI figures above), then add the top markets that feed your town's tourism. Professional translation is cheaper than owners assume: one large online agency advertises an average of US $0.10 per word with a 100-word minimum (Translated.com, rates page as read 2026-09-05), so a 40-dish menu with 20-word descriptions is roughly 800 words — about $80 a language at that rate, before any review pass you add. The expensive part is not the translation; it is reprinting every time a price or a dish changes, which is the argument for putting the translated version somewhere you can edit yourself rather than on card stock.

Is Google Translate good enough?

For your guest's side of the conversation, it is already happening whether you like it or not. Google says Lens — the camera feature that, among other things, translates whatever text it is pointed at — is "now used for nearly 20 billion visual searches every month" (Google, October 3, 2024). Guests point phones at menus. Two things follow.

First, write your English menu so that a machine translates it well: short sentences, ingredients named plainly, no puns in dish descriptions, cooking methods spelled out ("grilled" rather than "on the plancha"), sizes in a unit the guest can picture ("serves two" beats "16 oz" for most of the world). You are writing for a phone as much as for a person. Second, do not rely on the machine for the two things where a wrong answer hurts — allergens and prices. Those you check by hand, or you keep them in a form that needs no translating.

What can I do this week for nothing?

Photograph every dish and put the pictures where guests can see them; a picture crosses every language and settles the "how big is it" question the research says guests most often want answered. Make the nine-allergen grid and put it on the wall or at the counter. Give your servers a card with a dozen phrases — greeting, "this contains…", "how spicy would you like it", "anything not right?" — in the two languages you hear most, and let them point at it. Keep one phone at the pass with a translation app open in conversation mode for the moments a card cannot cover. When you next hire, notice the languages a candidate speaks; a bilingual server is a menu translation that walks. And ask, in whatever mix of words and gestures works, whether the meal was right — because the guest who could not read the menu is also the guest who will not tell you what went wrong.

Where Brief First fits

That last point is the one our own product exists for, for what it's worth. Brief First puts a free page on a small card at the table: the menu, in your words, and a private line to the manager — the guest types what went wrong and it lands on your screen exactly as written, while they are still seated. The page, the private line, the praise line and the server call cost nothing, ever. The paid tier, from $30 a month, adds an AI host that answers menu questions in whatever language the guest writes in — what's in a dish, how big it is, how hot — grounded only in your own descriptions, with no language list to choose from; and for a serious allergy it says what you would: your server confirms with the kitchen. Either way, the guest who cannot read your menu is the guest least likely to tell you what went wrong. A phrase card and a pointed finger close some of that gap this week; a host that reads their language closes the rest.