This website features bilingual menus by the restaurants participating in the 27th edition of the Artusi Festival in Forlimpopoli. The menus were translated using a prototype app... Learn more about the project

I ristoranti in Festa

The project

This website features bilingual menus by the restaurants participating in the 27th edition of the Artusi Festival in Forlimpopoli.

The menus were translated using a prototype app by researchers of the Department of Interpreting and Translation of the University of Bologna (Forlì Campus).

The task we have set for ourselves is to help international guests of the Festival choose dishes and order them more easily. But there’s more. Communicating Italy’s gastronomic culture, with its multitude of local recipes and ingredients, is a complex task. Menus typically feature terms which have no exact equivalent elsewhere: e.g., strozzapreti (an Italian pasta type) are not available in other cultures and, as a result, are not translated into other languages.

Our system automatically identifies non-translatable items, which are defined through a curated bilingual glossary, while the rest is translated with a high-quality machine translation system.

Our glossary is built from Wikipedia entries that belong to categories associated with the Emilia-Romagna cuisine, reviewed by our team experts, and from a collection of regional-cuisine menu entries prepared by professional translators.

An important note: for this experimental work, we only focused on the dishes proposed in the menus and excluded drinks. Please refer to the original versions of the menus for these.

Buon appetito, enjoy your meal!

Meet the team

Federico Garcea, Daniele Negretti, Maja Miličević Petrović, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño