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Blog - Excuse me; I think this donkey needs a new sparkplug! – Translation in the Travel and Leisure industry.

Excuse me; I think this donkey needs a new sparkplug! – Translation in the Travel and Leisure industry.

posted 2007-07-09 07:13:44
by Barry Lloyd

Having recently attended the "Eye for Travel" conference in London, I was amazed how much need there is for rapid translation in the travel and leisure industry.

Think about it - when you booked your last holiday, did you go in to a shop or book online? If you didn't book online, it’s fairly likely you researched your ideal destination or looked at prices using the web. And I'll bet you did it in your preferred/first language.

Much like many industries, travel and leisure has experienced (endured?) the quantum change of moving to the web - where for example, on visiting a travel agent's premises the assistant will rely on the travel companies web site if you ask for some detail on a property or product.

In a survey last year, IDC identified that when considering travel purchases, up to 80% of people think that availability of information in local language is either important or very important. Compare this with other sectors such as personal care or commodities where this ratio is much smaller. Perhaps this has to do with the size of a typical transaction in each space: On average, booking a flight or vacation still costs a considerable amount proportionate to purchasing a shaver or dog food! Perhaps it also has to do with the emotional importance we place on something like a vacation in a modern world where our free time is so valuable to us personally and to our families.

So, we know language is important for web-based travel consumers. Accuracy and timeliness are equally vital. First, should information on a flight or holiday destination be wrong, this would be a bad thing for all parties. Also, many consumers are looking to secure a purchase within days of the intended travel or vacation and indeed for travel and leisure companies this makes content velocity crucial.

As in many consumer oriented business models, all products have a life cycle and stock is finite. Equally, in travel and leisure things such as offers, seasonal campaigns, ones-offs, discounts, package reductions, new properties, new flight routes etc. must be constantly broadcast to the market to attract and re-attract business. And all this information has to be available in as short an interval of time as possible - and in multi-language if you are going to attract the maximum amount of business.

In short, the travel and leisure sector has some huge and challenging translation requirements, where content velocity and volume are the key issues to overcome.

In talking to a great many people at the conference, I was amazed at how many travel organisations don't utilise technology to automate as much as possible of their translation processes. Most are still relying on the manual processes they have used for years, but are starting to really feel the pressure. Many came to our stand and were eager to learn how they could offload some of the organisational demands that handling this daily "tidal flow" of multi-lingual content brings.

WorldServer, especially with the recent inclusion of MTM (Hybrid Machine/Translation memory) integration to enable rapid translation processing was of great interest to many people. Idiom of course already has a handful of blue-chip customers in this sector. I look forward to welcoming many more.

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