Allergy translation cards help to keep travellers out of danger

Food may be a universal language, but when something gets lost in translation, the consequences can be devastating -- and not just for your palate.

For as many as 3.3 million Canadians with food allergies, eating abroad can be like a game of Russian roulette. One false inflection or misspoken word in a foreign tongue can see an evening of haute cuisine end in a hospital visit.

But where most allergy sufferers might see this as a problem, one peanut-plagued man saw it as a business opportunity.
Over the past year, Kyle Dine has sold more than 1,000 "allergy translation cards" that help vacationers surmount the language barrier at restaurants. A recent commerce graduate of the University of Ottawa, Dine got the idea for AllergyTranslation.com after living in Sweden as an exchange student in 2005.

"It was a big eye-opener just trying to eat and stay alive over there," says Dine, for whom even a trace of nuts in his food could send him into anaphylactic shock.

"I'd see all these nice restaurants, but I'd end up going into a Swedish grocery store and buying a bag of Kit-Kat bars because they were less of a gamble."

Dine's credit-card-sized printouts can be tailored to almost any dietary restriction, with translations for more than 175 food allergies and 11 special diets in 22 languages, ranging from French, Spanish and German to Turkish, Slovenian and Croatian.

After paying an $8 fee, consumers are free to print as many of the customized cards as they want, then present them to waiters or chefs when dining out.

AllergyTranslation.com is just one of a growing number of linguistic services dedicated to niche audiences.

For vacationers who want to order a brewsky in 47 dialects, there's the nonprofit organization Esperanto-USA, which posts a list of free translations of "one beer please" on its website. According to pop-culture researcher Michael Mulvey, it's all part of a tourism landscape in which nobody wants to feel or look like an outsider. Discreet translation cards and online language services -- the latter unobtrusively accessed by any BlackBerry -- can help travellers blend in.

"We're more self-conscious than ever about standing out in a crowd just because of the nature of the political situation worldwide," says Mulvey, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Ottawa. "Nothing says 'mug me' like sitting in the middle of a square with a telephoto lens and a Frommers manual."

source:www.canada.com