Why Bao Shows Every Dish in Three Languages
You scan a plate of 蚵仔煎 and the app calls it "oyster omelette." Technically correct. Now try using that name for anything else — searching for it again, telling a local friend what you ate, matching it against a menu you're looking at right now. "Oyster omelette" doesn't connect to any of those. The dish has a name, and it isn't that one.
Every dish Bao recognizes comes back three ways: the English name, the Chinese name, and the native-script name of wherever the dish is actually from. Not a translation layered on top after the fact — all three come back from the same scan, together. Here's what that looks like for a dish whose native name is neither of the other two:
Why one name isn't enough
- If you grew up with the dish but not the English name — you know 蚵仔煎, not "oyster omelette." Logging it under a name you don't recognize means your food log stops feeling like your own food.
- If you're ordering from a menu you can't read — the name on the menu, the name in your log, and the name you'd say out loud to a server should all be the same word. One English-only translation breaks that chain.
- If you're explaining what you ate to someone else — "a Taiwanese egg pancake" and 蛋餅 are not obviously the same thing to the person you're talking to. The native name is the one that actually gets recognized.
It connects to the menu scanner
When Bao's menu scanner reads a restaurant menu, dishes come back in the same three-name format. What's printed on the menu, what shows up in the scan result, and what lands in your food log are the same name in the same script — nothing gets flattened into English-only along the way.
Honest limit: native-script naming is an AI estimate like everything else in a photo scan — accuracy depends on how clearly the dish is identifiable and how well-documented its regional name is. Rare or hyper-local dishes are harder to name correctly than well-known ones.
The bottom line
This isn't a translation feature bolted onto a Western calorie tracker. It's what "built for Asian and global cuisines as the primary case" actually looks like in the product — the dish keeps its own name, in every direction you'd need it.
See your food in its own name
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