We have already asked a few restaurants and we decided to work with two restaurants, as mentioned previously, we realized from talking to these restaurants that they seemed reluctant to cooperate with us and did not see the translated menu as a necessity in their restaurants, but still some restaurants were willing to have a translated version. We took a picture of their Chinese menu and began working on the product. I was responsible for designing the menu, I designed the PAPAMAMA private hot pot as well as the 面子館 menu. Throughout this experience, I realized that menu translation may not be the “problem solver” since some restaurants may see foreigners as burdensome, and we encountered a lot of problems when doing translation because the translated version often becomes somewhat confusing or less appetizing in english, and sometimes, the restaurants owner would like to make specific references to elements in Chinese culture or Chinese legends, while the mandarin speaker can look at the title and understand what the dish is about, foreigners can’t, so when we translate this kind of dish names, we often just research about the main ingredients of that dish and think of a completely different english name based on the main ingredients of that dish. It was interesting to see how cultural differences was actually harder to bridge than we thought, first it’s the language barriers, but we shouldn’t forget about the barriers on a psychological level, our TOK advisor once mentioned how many restauraunts owners refused to serve him or intentionally serve him last so that they didn’t need to spend extra efforts to communicate with a foreigner.
Version 1
Version 2
I focused on categorizing the dishes and making the arrangment of each block of aesthetically pleasing and understandable as well. I also made a easy design to fit the theme of the menu. I thought the woman holding an umbrella under the rain would give the costumer a warm feeling eating in this restaurant since the title of the restaurant is: “father and mother’s restaurant”.