What context actually means on a menu
Better Translate Team ·
秋刀魚 is three characters: autumn, sword, fish. Translated one character at a time
it is nonsense. Under a 焼き魚 heading it is sanma, Pacific saury, and you can order it.
The whole page goes at once
A menu is not sent line by line. The page goes in one request, which is what lets the model use
one line to read another. On our izakaya test board it built 33 of 40 dishes out of more
than one recognised fragment and identified five section headings. A line
sitting under 焼き魚 is known to be a fish before anything tries to name it.
Why this is the hard part
Japanese menu writing is full of compounds whose parts do not add up to the whole. Dish names get
shortened. Regional words appear with no explanation. A recogniser that reads a vertical board
splits names across fragments, so the model is often reassembling a word before it can translate it.
All of that is context work. It is also why a longer language list did nothing for us and why a
better photograph does more than a bigger model.
What you can do with it
Find the headings first. They tell you more than any single dish translation will, and they are
what makes the awkward characters underneath legible. If a line still looks wrong, point at the
original characters, which stay on screen beside every translation for exactly that reason.