Your Miami Restaurant Is Posting in English Only. Here Is What That Costs You.

Miami-Dade is a majority Spanish-speaking county. Most restaurant accounts in it post exclusively in English, and the ones that do post in Spanish usually run their English caption through a translator and publish the result.

Both are decisions. Neither is usually a deliberate one.

Translation is not the same product

Here is the test. Take your best-performing caption from the last month, translate it word for word into Spanish, and read it out loud to someone who grew up speaking it. Watch their face.

What goes wrong is not grammar. Translators handle grammar. What goes wrong is that the joke does not land, the rhythm is off, and the register is wrong — too formal, usually, in a way that reads like a bank rather than a restaurant. Humour, slang and warmth are the first things lost, and they happen to be the entire point of a restaurant account.

There is a second problem specific to this city. "Spanish" in Miami is not one thing. A Cuban customer in Hialeah, an Argentine in Brickell and a Colombian in Doral do not share vocabulary for food, and some words that are neutral in one country are funny or rude in another. A translation engine has no opinion about this. A person does.

What genuinely bilingual actually means

Not two accounts. Not every post duplicated. That is twice the work for less than twice the result, and it splits your audience in half.

What works is deciding, per piece, which language it lives in — and writing that piece in that language from scratch.

Video is where the difference shows. A reel where the chef speaks Spanish, subtitled in English, works for both audiences at once and feels like Miami rather than like a translation of somewhere else. The reverse works too. The point is that the spoken language is a choice, not an accident.

Some content is naturally bilingual. A dish, a room, a hand pouring something. No words needed, no version needed.

Some content should exist only in one. A promotion aimed at the neighbourhood around you, in the language that neighbourhood speaks. A tourist-facing post during high season, in English.

Comments get answered in whatever language they arrive in. This one is small and it matters more than any of the above. A restaurant that replies in Spanish to Spanish comments reads as a Miami restaurant. One that replies in English to everything reads as a chain.

What it adds to the budget

Less than most people assume, and more than nothing.

If you are already producing content, going properly bilingual is not double the cost. The shoot is the same shoot. What changes is the writing and the editing: separate captions written rather than translated, subtitles in the second language, and someone on community management who can hold a conversation in both. In practice that is a modest addition to a monthly program, not a second program.

What it does cost is a specific thing that is hard to buy cheaply — a person who is genuinely fluent in both, culturally rather than only linguistically, and who knows which Spanish this particular block of Miami speaks. That is the line item. It is also the reason most agencies quietly skip it and hand you translated captions instead.

How to tell whether yours is real

Three questions for whoever runs your account today.

"Who writes the Spanish?" If the answer involves a tool, you have translation, not bilingual content.

"Which of our posts this month were written in Spanish first?" If the answer is none, every Spanish caption you have published is a shadow of an English one.

"How do we reply to comments in Spanish?" If nobody has an answer, they are probably not being replied to.

Why this is worth doing now

Every restaurant in this city is competing for the same attention with roughly the same kind of content. Genuinely bilingual work is one of the few advantages that is hard to copy quickly, because it depends on having the right people rather than the right budget. It is also, in a majority Spanish-speaking county, closer to a baseline than an advantage — which is exactly why it is strange that so few accounts do it.

We produce content in both languages as a matter of course, with a bilingual crew in Miami and production in Medellín. The Spanish-language content page covers how that works.