Walk into almost any restaurant kitchen in Britain and you will hear more than one language. The same is true on the floor, and it has been true for as long as any of us have been doing this. What has generally not been true is the software. The booking system speaks English, everyone works around it, and the person whose English is their third language does a little more translation in their head every shift than anyone else on the team.
NomNom Web now speaks five languages: English, Español, Français, Deutsch and Cymraeg.
It's a personal setting, not a venue one
This is the part we thought hardest about. A restaurant does not have a language — the people in it do. So the choice belongs to the person, not the venue. You will find it in the account menu, under Language.
Pick a language and the app switches immediately, then remembers. Your colleague on the next terminal keeps whatever they chose. Nobody has to agree, and no manager has to decide on everyone's behalf.
It goes deeper than the menus
Translating the buttons on the main screen is the easy half. The place a language barrier actually costs you is three dialogs deep, at eight on a Saturday, when someone is trying to work out what a confirmation setting does. So we went through the lot: every dialog, every wizard, the floor plan editor, the reports, the settings and configuration panels, the sign-in screens and the new-venue setup.
We translate our words, not yours
One rule ran through the whole job: NomNom translates what NomNom says, and never touches what you have typed.
Your guests' names, your notes, your room and table names, the meal names you set up, the booking statuses you named yourself — all of it stays exactly as you wrote it. Switch to German and the room called Conservatory is still the Conservatory. That matters more than it sounds: if a room's name changed depending on who was looking at the screen, two people could no longer talk to each other about the same table.
Why Welsh
Cymraeg next to three of the largest languages in Europe probably looks like the odd one out. It isn't, at least not to us. We have customers in Wales, Welsh is an official language there, and a booking system that ignores it is making a small statement about who it is built for.
An honest caveat, because you will find out anyway: our Welsh is a careful first draft rather than a native speaker's work. If you read a screen and something is clumsy or plainly wrong, we would genuinely rather hear it than not. The same goes for the Spanish, French and German — software translated in isolation always has a few phrases that no one would actually say out loud.
What isn't translated yet
Worth being straight about the edges, so nothing comes as a surprise:
- This is NomNom Web, the browser version. The phone and tablet app is still English for now.
- Your guests still book in English. The public booking page is a separate piece of the system and hasn't been done yet.
- Confirmation emails and texts are still English. Those are composed on our servers rather than in the app, so they need their own piece of work.
- Dates and numbers still use the current format. The words change; the formatting hasn't caught up yet.
All four are on the list. We would rather ship the part that is genuinely finished than describe the whole thing as done.
If your language isn't here
Five is where we started, not where we intend to stop. If your team needs a language we haven't covered, get in touch and we'll add it. That is a real offer, not a polite one — we would far rather choose the next language from what our customers actually need than from a list of what looks impressive.
And if your whole team is happy in English, nothing about your NomNom has changed. That's fine too.