2 International Dining: Restaurant Menu Translation Service

Travelers to a foreign land often have difficulty making sense of restaurant menus due to both language and cultural differences. This project involves building the workflow / infrastructure for a service to ease the complexities of international dining.

The input to this system will be a restaurant menu, submitted either scanned or in some meaningful text representation (e.g. .doc or .txt) or perhaps scraped from a webpage. The output will be a meaningful menu in all popular languages, both as a webpage and in a printable document.

The primary technical challenges are:

• Set up a database of dishes with associated translations.
• Segment and parse arbitrary restaurant menus.
• Match up menu entries to database entries.
• Farm out translation (and possibly segmentation) tasks to Amazon Turk.
• Identify photos of dishes in Flicker or other photo services.
• Assemble a printable translated menu.
• Generate a webpage for each restaurant.
• Create an international dining website with proper search capabilities.