The German menu was translated two summers ago by a guest's friend as a favour. Since then eleven dishes have changed and four have been added, so the German version is partly wrong and partly missing.
A guest orders what they read as a vegetable dish. It arrives with anchovy in the dressing, because the English description mentions it and the German one — written before the recipe changed — does not.
Nobody on the team reads German, so the error has been on the table for two summers and will stay there until a guest complains loudly enough. That is the defining property of translation failures: they are silent to the people who could fix them.
Making translations inspectable rather than assumed is most of the answer. Every string is stored and editable, a property can see which content has a translation and which is falling back to the original, and a correction made once applies everywhere that string appears.
Menu copy and interface labels are handled separately on purpose — one is prose a chef cares about, the other is terse labels that must stay consistent across hundreds of screens — and neither overwrites a translation a human has written.
Why this matters to you: a wrong translation on an allergen or an ingredient is a safety issue rather than a presentation one, and it is invisible to your entire team by definition.