Language
What this is for
Restodesk can run in more than one language at once — staff in one, guests in another, receipts in two.
Under Settings › Language.
Three separate choices
They're independent, and mixing them up is the usual confusion:
| Setting | Decides |
|---|---|
| Available languages | Which languages exist for this restaurant. |
| Customer site language | What guests see when ordering online. |
| Receipt languages | What prints on a receipt. |
Staff also pick their own working language, per user.
Staff language
Each member of staff has their own language, set on their profile.
This matters more than it sounds in a kitchen where your team doesn't all share a first language. A cook working the POS in their own language makes fewer mistakes, and it costs you nothing.
Encourage people to set it. Most won't discover it on their own.
Customer site language
Your ordering site can be presented in a different language from the one your staff work in — see Customer site.
Pick what your guests read, which isn't necessarily what your staff speak. A restaurant with a Spanish-speaking kitchen in an English-speaking neighbourhood serves an English site.
Receipt languages
Receipts can print in more than one language at once, configured under Receipts and printers.
Worth doing where you have a genuinely bilingual customer base, or where local rules require a particular language on a receipt.
Two cautions:
- Every extra language makes the receipt longer. Two languages is roughly double the paper.
- Check it prints. Scripts with different character sets don't always render on thermal printers, and the only way to know is to print one.
What gets translated, and what doesn't
Translated: the interface — buttons, labels, screens, standard messages.
Not translated: anything you typed. Your menu item names, descriptions, category names, modifier names, area names and table codes appear exactly as you entered them.
That's the thing to plan around. Switching the customer site to French doesn't translate "Grilled Sea Bass" — you'd need a French menu, and how you handle that depends on your operation. Some restaurants write bilingual item names; others accept that dish names stay in one language, which is normal in hospitality anyway.
Adding a language
Available languages are managed in the language settings. Where a language pack isn't already present, adding one is a platform-level action — contact support and we'll enable it. See Getting support.
Only English is maintained as the source language; the others are generated from it, so a newly added language may lag slightly behind on very recent features.
Good to know
- Language settings are per restaurant.
- Staff language is per user, and doesn't affect what guests see.
- Currency and number formatting are separate — see Currency, numbers, date and time.
- Some jurisdictions have legal requirements about the language on customer-facing documents. Check locally; this guide can't tell you.