Six translation tips for travel

A lavish suite on the Vegas strip. A private bungalow in Bora Bora. A luxurious lodge amid the Alps.

Wherever your global destination resides, being a professional in the travel and hospitality industry isn’t all that bad.

Sure, you may not get all the amenities that your guests do – but getting to communicate your company’s perks with those interested in some vacation time is pretty exciting.

Yet throw in translations – and that’s where your job can get frustrating.

Between the constant changes in your company’s content and the global scale of your target audience, translating your company’s materials can be both time consuming and costly – especially when you consider that consumer satisfaction is so dependent upon the quality of your translations.

We work with a lot of travel, leisure and hospitality companies that face these same complexities. So to offer some hospitality of our own, here are six translation tips that will help ensure your company’s translations are as accommodating as your global services.

·       Attract travelers globally, not just locally

 

While it may feel like the easiest route to take, using an in-house translator or personal acquaintance as a linguist isn’t going to cut it for your out-of-country consumers. Having appropriate target language experience is important, and so is having travel and leisure experience; knowing what messaging resonates best with your out-of-country consumers. The last thing you want your translated content to contain is unfamiliar language or cultural-specific lingo that may confuse your consumers – or worse yet, steer them away from your travel and leisure services.

That’s why it is very important that your language service provider offers linguists who not only know your target language, but also specialize in the art of persuading consumers and communicating the benefits of your hospitality business. This way, they will be much more suitable for providing you with high quality travel, leisure and hospitality focused translations.

·       Make room for your frequent translation updates – no matter how small

 

In a seasonally variable industry like travel and hospitality, it’s almost certain that you’re going to update content frequently – and therefore face translation needs often. Even if these translation needs are minimal, you know they can be time consuming and hard to allocate resources for. Simply not translating them isn’t an option though – otherwise you run the risk of misinforming, or even missing out on, foreign guests.

Small, frequent travel translation updates don’t have to be such a hassle, though. By leveraging a translation memory system from your language service provider you can significantly reduce the costs associated with translating duplicate or similar content. Leveraging a translation memory can also help speed up the translation process – so you don’t have to worry about small projects taking up so much time to be completed.

If you’re currently using translation memory software, but you still feel like your travel translation process needs to run faster, language service providers like Sajan can also offer integrated machine translation – which pairs a trained travel and hospitality translation engine with post-editing linguists to give you quick, reliable travel translations sooner. For more information on how this works, see our blog post Successful machine translations: A peek inside the training process.

·       Book your numerous projects with a translation management system

 

Due to the large global audiences that need to be targeted, travel, leisure and hospitality companies commonly request translations in multiple languages. With multiple languages come multiple files – which can make the travel translation process cumbersome and unsystematic. Add this on top of your already busy work schedule, and things can only get worse.

To make the travel translation process easier and more manageable, language service providers offer translation management systems which centralize your company’s translation projects. With a system like this you can request, submit and inquire about translation projects all in one central location. For a fast-paced industry like yours, translation management systems are a hassle-free solution to a disorganized process.

·       Don’t let poor user functionality make your destination less desirable

 

Customer satisfaction is a very important part of retaining your consumers and advertising to new prospects. If a customer is not impressed with your translated materials or frustrated with your localized website, they are likely to share negative reviews with friends and other prospects – or even abandon your webpage for a competitor’s.

To avoid negative backlash and inadequate travel translations, make sure your translation provider integrates formal quality assurances measures into the entire translation process in order to identify, address and eliminate quality concerns throughout all stages of translation. Your language service provider also needs to implement a final approval step to ensure you are never provided with travel translations that are not up to your business’s standards. To learn more about the quality-ensuring processes that you should expect from your translation provider, see our previous blog series: 10 crucial ways to ensure high quality translations.

·       Discover travel translation expertise in all content types

 

The travel, leisure and hospitality industry requires many outlets for translation. To attract new customers you have to have a well-translated website and e-commerce software. To retain and serve consumers, you’re also expected to translate maps, signage, announcements, newsletters and other forms of communication.

With robust travel translation needs like this, it’s more practical to have a language service provider who can handle numerous translation requests effectively.  Larger, more scalable language service providers can offer a lineup of linguistic professionals who each specialize in online communications, written communications, training materials, software localization or other travel translation specialties that you may need in order to keep your company 

competitive in such a fast-paced industry. Similarly, if you are already working with multiple translation vendors, language service providers like Sajan can offer managed services, which help manage your translation workload in full, or in part. Check out our Managed Services and Content Specialties webpages to learn more about these offerings.

Don’t let translations put a damper on your guest’s vacation getaway. Remember these six tips and you’ll have travel, leisure and hospitality translations to help you roll out the welcoming mat.

Learn more about Sajan’s travel, leisure and hospitality translation services.

Are you responsible for requesting translations at your travel, leisure or hospitality organization? If so, what are some management tips you wish to share with other professionals in your position?