Tourism, translation and your website

Are you attracting enough foreign visitors?

Tourism is one of the biggest industries in the UK and in 2006 was worth approximately £85.6 billion. It is estimated that 32.6 million overseas visitors came to the UK in 2007.

It is likely that their first step in booking their journey would have been to visit a website of the town, city or tourist attraction they were interested in. This highlights the importance of having your website translated. If a potential customer arrives at your website, doesn’t speak much English and finds that none of the information is available in their language, it could mean you are losing potential business.

Although in Britain, we may like to think that most of the world speaks our language, in fact only about 8% of the world’s population speaks English. How are we to attract foreign visitors and foreign businesses if we don’t communicate with them in their own language?

For example, imagine you wanted to arrange a trip to Japan and you know little or nothing of the language. Your first point of contact, when researching your trip is probably going to be a Japanese website, where you can find information about local sites of interest, entertainment, details and prices of hotels. If none of this information is provided in your language, what will you do? Look elsewhere? Decide to struggle on? Or decide to take a more local holiday?

If we want visitors to come to Britain and enjoy the variety of attractions on offer, we need to make it easy for them to do it from the very beginning.

But then once they are here, how can we be sure they have correctly understood any of the amazing sights, they have seen. Without communicating with visitors in their own language, many museums, galleries, stately homes, palaces, and sporting attractions run the risk of being simply interesting images, without any background information or substance.

Some regional tourism organisations in the UK are already promoting their towns and cities on their websites in foreign languages and working hard to cater for the foreign visitor. But more can be done to advertise popular tourist attractions and events in foreign languages and gain an advantage over the competition.

Talk to visitors in their own language

Having a website that talks to your foreign visitors in their own language is much more inviting than making them struggle to understand what you are saying.

For many years, we at Syntacta have been providing an increasing number of tourism organisations and tourist attractions with high quality translations of brochures, websites and what’s on guides, helping them to reach their target market more effectively.

We work with translators who write with flair and creativity, making your descriptions sound as seductive in the foreign language as they did when you wrote them in English. Our translators will also research the destination in great detail, making sure that all the cultural intricacies and nuances are fully understood.

We aim to make our translations reflect the style and tone of the original English text; but rather than translate directly, we make sure any idiomatic phrases are rendered in the correct way in the foreign language.

For more information, simply call us or request details via the contact form.

Translating the London 2012 Olympic Games. Are you ready to talk to the world?

At the Beijing Olympics in 2008 a service offering the translation of 55 languages was made available by the Beijing Organising Committee. This comprised of 5,000 spoken word interpreters and 100,000 volunteers.

The London 2012 Olympic Games will present a major opportunity for many tourism organisations and sporting and historical attractions to capture the imaginations of foreign visitors and present them with an unforgettable visit to these shores. If we can help them to overcome the language barriers they’ll face, their visit will be all the more meaningful.

If you are thinking of promoting your service, product or tourist attraction to foreign visitors in their own language, we can offer you high quality translations at competitive prices.

For more information, simply call us or request details via the contact form.

We work across many industries

• Medical
• Pharmaceutical
• Scientific
• Technical
• Tourism
• Advertising
• Marketing
• Market research
• Legal
• Financial
• Insurance
• Software translation

To find out more

call us on 08444 121830