How to Write a Bilingual Arabic-English Menu: Dish Names, Descriptions and Layout
12 min read
A good bilingual Arabic-English menu is not a translation. It is the same dish written twice: once for a guest who grew up eating it, once for a guest who may never have heard of it. Keep the dish's real name, explain it in one line, and make every number match in both languages.
Below: when to translate and when to keep a name, a table of 29 Gulf and Levant dishes you can copy, a before-and-after description, the right-to-left details that quietly break Arabic menus, and what Saudi rules say about Arabic.
Translate, transliterate, or keep the name?
Every dish name falls into one of three cases. Decide which before you write anything, and most translation problems never happen.
- Keep the Arabic name in Latin letters when the dish is known by that name and English has no real equivalent: Mandi, Kabsa, Machboos, Harees, Karak, Shawarma, Kunafa, Luqaimat. Put a one-line English description under it. A visitor who has read about Machboos is looking for that word, not for "spiced rice with chicken".
- Translate when the Arabic name is simply a description: دجاج مشوي is Grilled chicken, عصير برتقال is Orange juice, سلطة خضراء is Green salad. Writing "Dajaj mashwi" helps nobody.
- Keep and explain when the literal meaning sounds odd in English: لسان عصفور is orzo, not a sparrow's tongue, and أم علي is a baked pudding, not a person. Keep Umm Ali as the name and let the description do the work.
The same logic runs the other way. Dishes that came from English keep their names in Arabic letters: burger is برجر, Caesar salad is سلطة سيزر, flat white is فلات وايت. An Arabic reader recognises برجر instantly; "شطيرة لحم مفروم" makes them stop and decode.
House names are the exception. If your signature platter is called طبق الشيخ, keep "Al Sheikh Platter" as the name and say what is on it. The name is your brand; the description is for the guest.
Common Gulf and Levant dishes in Arabic and English
The English names below are forms commonly seen on menus in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Jordan. Where several spellings exist, we picked one; if your guests know another, use theirs and stay consistent. The descriptions are generic, so edit them to match your recipe.
| Arabic | English name on the menu | Short English description |
|---|---|---|
| شاي كرك | Karak tea | Black tea boiled with milk, sugar and cardamom. |
| قهوة عربية | Arabic coffee (gahwa) | Lightly roasted coffee with cardamom, served in small cups. |
| مندي | Mandi | Spiced rice with lamb or chicken, slow-cooked for a light smoky flavour. |
| كبسة | Kabsa | Spiced rice cooked with chicken or lamb, tomato and dried lime. |
| مجبوس | Machboos | Rice cooked in the spiced stock of chicken, lamb or fish, with dried lime. |
| مدفون | Madfoon | Lamb or chicken cooked slowly in a sealed pot, over spiced rice. |
| هريس | Harees | Wheat and meat slow-cooked and beaten smooth, finished with ghee. |
| جريش | Jareesh | Crushed wheat simmered with chicken or meat and laban, topped with fried onion. |
| سليق | Saleeg | Creamy rice cooked in stock and milk, served with roast chicken. |
| مرقوق | Margoog | Thin dough sheets cooked in a meat and vegetable stew. |
| منسف | Mansaf | Lamb cooked in jameed (dried yoghurt) sauce, over rice with toasted nuts. |
| مقلوبة | Maqluba | Rice, meat and fried vegetables cooked in layers, turned upside down. |
| شاورما | Shawarma | Marinated chicken or meat sliced from a vertical grill, with garlic or tahini sauce. |
| شيش طاووق | Shish tawook | Chicken cubes marinated in yoghurt, garlic and lemon, grilled on skewers. |
| مشاوي مشكلة | Mixed grill | A selection of grilled meats; list exactly what is on your plate. |
| حمص | Hummus | Chickpea purée with tahini, lemon and olive oil. |
| متبل | Mutabbal | Smoky roasted aubergine with tahini and lemon. |
| فتوش | Fattoush | Chopped salad with toasted bread, sumac and pomegranate molasses. |
| فلافل | Falafel | Fried patties of ground chickpeas or fava beans with herbs. |
| فول مدمس | Foul medames | Slow-cooked fava beans with olive oil, lemon and cumin. |
| شكشوكة | Shakshuka | Eggs cooked in a tomato, pepper and onion sauce. |
| مناقيش زعتر | Za'atar manakish | Flatbread baked with za'atar and olive oil. |
| بلاليط | Balaleet | Sweet vermicelli with saffron and cardamom, topped with a thin omelette. |
| لقيمات | Luqaimat | Small fried dough balls with date syrup and sesame. |
| كنافة | Kunafa | Shredded pastry over melted cheese, soaked in sugar syrup. |
| أم علي | Umm Ali | Baked pastry pudding with milk, nuts and raisins. |
| ليمون بالنعناع | Lemon mint | Fresh lemon juice blended with mint and ice. |
| لبن | Laban | Cold, lightly salted yoghurt drink. |
| جلاب | Jallab | Chilled drink of grape molasses, dates and rose water, with pine nuts. |
Two checks before you copy a row. Recipes differ by country and by kitchen, so change the ingredients to match yours. And if a dish contains nuts, sesame, wheat or dairy, the description is where you say so, in both languages (more on that below).
Writing descriptions for each reader
The Arabic reader usually knows the dish. They want to know how yours is made: which spices, which cut, what comes with it. Keep the Arabic description short and specific. The English reader may not know the dish at all, so lead with the main ingredient and the cooking method, then the sides.
- English: main ingredient, method, one flavour note, what it comes with. "Lamb shoulder slow-cooked in spiced stock, over saffron rice. Served with daqqus."
- Arabic: the detail a regular would ask the waiter about. «لحم غنم مطبوخ على نار هادئة، مع رز بالزعفران ودقوس.»
- Both: no "delicious", "authentic" or "finest ingredients". Every menu says that, so it tells the guest nothing.
- Both: roughly 10 to 25 words. Longer text gets skipped on a phone.
Before and after: Chicken Machboos
| Field | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| English name | Chiken Majbous | Chicken Machboos |
| English description | The famous and very delicious chicken majboos prepared with the finest fresh ingredients in the authentic way. | Rice cooked in spiced chicken stock with dried lime, topped with a quarter chicken. Served with daqqus (spicy tomato sauce). |
| Arabic name | مجبوس الدجاج المميز | مجبوس دجاج |
| Arabic description | طبق مجبوس الدجاج الشهير واللذيذ جداً والمحضّر من أجود المكونات الطازجة على الطريقة الأصيلة. | رز ببهارات المجبوس واللومي، مطبوخ بمرق الدجاج، مع ربع دجاجة ودقوس. |
The "before" version misspells chicken, spells the dish two ways, and says nothing a guest can use. The "after" version tells a newcomer what they are ordering and a regular how this kitchen makes it. Neither is a translation of the other.
Keep the facts identical in both languages
Words can differ between languages. Facts cannot. Two friends reading the same dish in Arabic and English should never see two prices or two allergen lists. Check every dish before the menu goes live.
- Price: one number, same currency label, same decimals.
- Size: grams, pieces or cup size match (250 g and 250 غرام, not 250 g and "large").
- Allergens: every allergen named in one language is named in the other.
- Spice level: if English says "very spicy", Arabic says «حار جداً», not «حار قليلاً».
- Calories, if you show them: the same figure in both descriptions.
- Diet notes: vegetarian, vegan, gluten-free or sugar-free appear in both, or in neither.
- Add-ons and their prices: extra cheese, extra chicken, oat milk.
- Hot or iced, and whether a drink contains caffeine.
Right-to-left details that break Arabic menus
Arabic runs right to left, but numbers and Latin words inside an Arabic line still run left to right. Browsers sort this out with the Unicode bidirectional algorithm, which needs the page or text block to be marked right-to-left to get the order right; the W3C guide to right-to-left text in HTML explains why. On a menu, these are the places it goes wrong.
| Problem | What guests see | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Latin word at the end of an Arabic line | The full stop or bracket jumps to the wrong side | Write the word in Arabic letters, or move it to the middle of the sentence |
| Number ranges | "12-15" can display as 15-12 next to Arabic text | Write «من 12 إلى 15» in Arabic |
| Units in Latin letters | "250g" breaks the flow of an Arabic line | Use «250 غرام» in Arabic and "250 g" in English |
| Mixed digits | 1, 2, 3 in one dish and ١، ٢، ٣ in the next | Pick Western or Eastern Arabic digits for the whole menu |
| English punctuation in Arabic | Commas and question marks look wrong | Use the Arabic comma ، and question mark ؟ |
Currency: signs, codes and decimals
Saudi Arabia and the UAE now have their own currency signs. The Saudi Central Bank's guidelines put the riyal sign to the left of the number, with a space, in every language. The UAE Central Bank unveiled a dirham sign on 27 March 2025. Both are now in the Unicode currency chart, but older phones and fonts may not draw them yet. If you use a sign, open your menu on a few phones first; if it shows as an empty box, use SAR, AED, ر.س or د.إ instead.
Decimals matter in Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Jordan: under the ISO 4217 standard their currencies have three decimal places, so a price is written BD 1.500, not BD 1.5. Whatever you choose, use the same label and the same decimals in both languages.
Bilingual menu layout on a phone: one language at a time
On a printed menu, two columns work: Arabic on the right, English on the left. On a phone, the same layout halves the width of each language, the two scripts need different line heights, and a guest scrolls past twice as much text to find one dish.
A digital menu can show one language at a time, full width, and let the guest switch with one tap. The Arabic version reads right to left with Arabic category names; the English version reads left to right. Prices stay the same because they come from the same place. Try it on our demo menu in English and Arabic.
- Guests read their own language at full size, without the other script in the way.
- Search finds a dish whether the guest types its Arabic or its English name.
- You write each description for its reader, instead of squeezing two into one box.
Should you use machine translation?
Use it for a first draft, never for the final menu. A study of menus from 10 restaurants and coffee shops in Muscat found that the translation strategies in use, literal translation among them, caused lexical ambiguity, lack of clarity and confusion. Machine tools make the same mistakes, only faster.
- Literal dish names: لسان عصفور becomes "sparrow's tongue" and زنود الست becomes "lady's arms". Keep these names and explain them.
- Wrong dialect: Gulf guests say بطاطس for potatoes; many Levant guests say بطاطا. A machine picks one without asking where you are.
- Translated brand names: a café called "The Corner" does not become «الزاوية» on the menu unless that really is your Arabic name.
- Grammar that sounds foreign: English word order, wrong gender agreement, adjectives stacked the English way.
A better workflow: give the tool (or the translator) the dish table above as a glossary, ask for short descriptions, then have a native speaker from your own market read every line on a phone.
In Saudi Arabia, allergen information must be in Arabic
Since 1 October 2019, the Saudi Food and Drug Authority has required places that serve food outside the home, restaurants and cafés included, to show allergens in their menus permanently, clearly and legibly, in Arabic, with translation into other languages allowed. The rule is technical regulation SFDA.FD 56/2018, and it covers 14 allergens, including gluten cereals, milk, eggs, tree nuts, peanuts, sesame, fish and crustaceans.
For a bilingual menu, that makes Arabic the version that counts. An English-only allergen note does not meet the rule. We cover the full list and the other Saudi menu rules in what a Saudi restaurant menu must show.
Setting it up in AlaMenu
In AlaMenu, every dish has its own Arabic name, English name, Arabic description and English description, and categories are named in both languages too. You enter the price once, so it can't drift between languages. Guests switch language with one tap, and the Arabic menu renders right to left. If a dish has no Arabic name yet, the Arabic menu shows the English one, so nothing disappears while you finish writing.
There are no separate allergen or calorie fields, so write those into both descriptions, in the same words each time. AlaMenu does not translate for you; the words are yours, which is the point of this guide. The Free plan covers one branch and up to 10 dishes per category, and paid plans remove the dish limit (see pricing). To build the menu step by step, start with how to create a free QR menu. For Jordan, see QR menus in Amman. Other questions are answered in the FAQ.
Questions
Should dish names be translated or transliterated?
Keep the name in Latin letters when guests know the dish by it (Mandi, Kabsa, Machboos, Karak) and add a one-line English description. Translate names that are only descriptions, such as grilled chicken or orange juice.
Should prices appear in both languages?
Yes, and they must be identical: same number, same currency label, same decimals. On a digital menu, enter the price once so both languages read it from the same place.
Is Google Translate good enough for a menu?
Only as a first draft. It tends to translate dish names literally and can pick the wrong dialect for your market. Have a native speaker from your market read every line before the menu goes live.
How do I show Arabic and English on one QR menu?
Use one QR code that opens a menu with a language switch. Each guest reads one language at full width, and Arabic displays right to left. You can see this on our demo menu.
Do Saudi menus have to be in Arabic?
At minimum, allergen information must be in Arabic, with translation into other languages allowed, under SFDA rules in force since 1 October 2019. See Saudi menu requirements.
Can guests switch language on an AlaMenu menu?
Yes, with one tap. Each dish has its own Arabic and English name and description, and the Arabic version displays right to left.
Sources
- Saudi Food and Drug Authority: disclosure of food allergens from 1 October 2019 (Arabic)
- Restaurant staff's knowledge of food allergy in Qassim, Saudi Arabia (PLOS One, 2024), citing SFDA.FD 56/2018
- W3C: Structural markup and right-to-left text in HTML
- Saudi Central Bank: Saudi Riyal Symbol Guidelines (PDF)
- UAE Government portal: the UAE national currency and the new dirham symbol
- Unicode code chart: Currency Symbols (PDF)
- SIX, ISO 4217 maintenance agency: currency codes and minor units
- Al-Rushaidi and Ali, Translating Food Menus from English into Arabic (AWEJ, 2017)
Try it on your own menu
AlaMenu's Free plan includes the bilingual QR menu, table bookings on a floor plan and WhatsApp confirmations. No card required.
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