Las Tapas (The Appetizer) – The Inspiration for the Project
When you sit down at a restaurant, there’s always a question of what your experience is going to be. Does this restaurant have me seat myself? Do I wait for a hostess? Will there be bread served before I order or after? Is water free? Is my waitperson nice or do they want me to order my food and get out of Dodge? When it comes down to it, every person’s idea of a restaurant service is different and unique to them. When someone goes somewhere foreign, whether it’s in their home country or to a new one, restaurants are the first place they go and give the first impression of the new area. Yet, often times, if you are not a speaker of the home language, the simple task of finding a restaurant can be a difficult one. In a place like Altus, Oklahoma, a center for international cargo pilot training, restaurants with multiple languages is not simply nice-to-have, but also a necessity for the foreigners who relocate there for one reason or another.
El Plato Principal (The Entree) – The Project
I worked with a small team, consisting of Altus-native Dayna Brown (she/her), Meinan Liu (she/her), and Gretchen Mina (she/her), to help take a small town restaurant from yesteryear to this year. The original Fred’s website is a time capsule of web design: it still reeks of early 1990s design that favored making everything look like it was a newspaper advertisement rather than something novel and new. “But why would we improve on something if it still works?” I’ll answer that with a relevant scenario: imagine you want to make red-velvet cake with very little baking experience and you only have the original recipe. Instead of the easy few drops of red food coloring you’d normally add in a modern cake, you’re now boiling beets to get red dye or adding 12 ounces of wine to get that lovely red color. Instead of an easy cream cheese frosting, you have to make Ermine icing, which entails boiling milk and flour to make the base, waiting for it to cool, and then mixing it once more in a stand mixer to get an icing you can use. Nowadays, those processes are streamlined to box cake mixes or simply cutting time by using red food coloring and cream cheese frosting. Either way, you still get a beautiful, tasty cake, but you labored for one when you could’ve just bought the ten-dollar cake mix from the store. We can apply this same concept to web design.
Aside from taking something from the past, there is another important factor to why we chose this: the human factor. Altus, Oklahoma may not be the most famous city in Oklahoma nor the definition of a tourist destination, but it is still a hub of both international and domestic visitors. It is home to one of the largest US military training bases in the country, and it draws in both US servicemen and servicemen from allied countries to Altus for pilot and cargo plane training. As someone who has been a foreigner both in the US and abroad, there is nothing more meaningful than finding a taste of home in even the tiniest ways. If that means finding a restaurant that speaks your language, then that service should be provided. Hence why we thought we’d bring a little taste of home to the foreigners of Altus, Oklahoma.
La Receta (The Recipe) – Our Process
The most important part of any dish is its preparation and with Fred’s, careful consideration and planning were important. First, the website needed to be updated which was expertly done by Dayna Brown. She took the website from its multiple-page antiquated HTML to a single page Bootstrap website using the theme Yummy, designed for restaurant websites.
Transcreation of the Menu titles from English to Spanish
When it came to translating, there needed to be some transcreation, particularly for the Spanish page and the Chinese page. For Russian, as explained to me by Gretchen, it is more acceptable to keep the original text when translating things like “Price Busters” because it is known to be foreign. For Chinese and Spanish, the opposite needs to be done. In Spanish, only if the word is trademarked does it stay in its original format (the only exception I made was to the words “Darn Tootin'”), and in Chinese, the character system requires some transliteration or transcreation to be completed. So, for Meinan and I, we needed to keep some of that Southern charm in our target languages.
Secondly, we needed to add a language selector which proved to be a challenge. Since we did not create the theme, none of the variables in the CSS nor HTML were familiar to us and it took time to figure out what it all meant. Of course when we localized it, a language selector would be needed for all of our new languages; however, the CSS made finding a simple dropdown hard and, even when implemented, it still needed to be adjusted. For example, at first it wouldn’t recognize the drop down because of the class name it needed. When it finally did, the text was white on a white background making it impossible to see the actual selections. I needed to go into the CSS myself and change the text color, which was tedious when my Find feature found 28 instances of drop-down. Eventually, it became the smooth process you see above.
The whole process is quickly broken down in the 1-minute video below.
El Postre y “la cuenta, por favor” (The Dessert and “Check, please!”) – Reflection
In this project, I aimed to do one thing: serve up a piece of home to those who are far away from home. While it is still a Southern restaurant, having a website in your native language can ease some of the homesickness that comes with being a foreigner. My teammate Dayna efficiently and beautifully crafted a website that brought the website to the present while my other teammates did wonderfully in translating that website to their language. In the end, I am proud of our website and what we accomplished.
Throughout this process, I was able to see how in-depth localization really is. It’s not just taking something and translating it linguistically, but engineering it to be accessible to everyone that sees it. Localization is like cooking: the end result brings people together whether they are strangers, family, or friends. All we want to do is dig in and enjoy.
