Website Translation for Travel Brands: Inspiration and Logistics in One Site

A travel brand’s website carries a heavier language load than a hotel’s. A hotel sells a property. A tour operator, attraction, destination marketing organisation, airline or transport operator sells an experience that has to be imagined before it can be bought, and then explained precisely enough to be booked.

Those two jobs pull in opposite directions when they cross a language boundary. The imaginative half needs rebuilding in the target culture; the precise half must not move at all. Running both through one treatment is how a travel site ends up either flat or unreliable.

This piece sets out how to scope website translation for travel brands, which surfaces need which treatment, and what to get right in itinerary, ticketing and safety content.

Key Takeaways

• Travel sites split cleanly into inspiration content, which has to be transcreated, and operational content — times, prices, inclusions, conditions, safety — which has to be translated exactly and kept in sync.
• The hardest content is the middle: itinerary descriptions and ticket inclusions, which are simultaneously persuasive and contractual. Write the framing and render the specification.
• Place names, transport terms and currency and date formats break more travel pages than prose does. Settle them once, record them, and the rest of the site gets easier.

The two kinds of content on a travel website

Sort the site into inspiration and operation before scoping anything, because the two need opposite things from a translator.

IPPWORLD defines transcreation as creative translation: a process that adapts the emotional expressions and contextual relevance of the source message, beyond the literal meaning of words. The rows marked transcreation are the ones where that is the whole point. The rows marked translation are the ones where creative latitude would be a defect.

Inspiration has to be rebuilt in the target culture. Logistics has to survive untouched. Most travel pages contain both.

The details that break travel pages

More travel content fails on conventions than on prose, and conventions are cheap to get right if they are decided once.

• Place names. Decide per market whether a destination, district or landmark is given in the local form, the target-language form, or both. Travellers search in the form they know, and a page that uses only the other one is invisible to them.
• Transport and ticketing terms. Station and terminal names, fare classes, pass names and transfer types are a fixed-term list, not prose. They should be settled before writing.
• Dates, times and durations. Formats differ, and so does what counts as obvious. “Three nights, four days” is standard in some markets and unnatural in others.
• Currency and price display. Symbol position, separators and whether taxes are shown inclusive all vary. This is a presentation decision as much as a language one.
• Measurements and seasons. Distances, temperatures and “high season” all mean different things to different source markets.
• Metadata and alt text. Easy to omit from scope, read by search engines and screen readers, and worth target-language keyword consideration rather than straight substitution.

Itineraries: the hardest content on the site

An itinerary is a sales document and an operational commitment in the same paragraph, which is why it is where travel brands most often get the treatment wrong.

The workable split is structural. The sentence that describes what the day feels like is transcreated. The line that states departure time, duration, inclusion, exclusion and meeting point is translated exactly, and changed only when the operation changes. Keeping those two in separate content fields rather than in one block of prose makes the distinction maintainable rather than aspirational.

The same logic applies to attraction and ticket pages. The description of the experience is brand content; the list of what the ticket admits you to is not.

What travel work looks like in practice

Travel and tourism content tends to arrive as a programme rather than a project, because the operational half changes on a schedule.

For Gardens by the Bay, marketing and media brochures were produced in 10 languages under a two-year preferred-vendor contract won through public tender with trials, with the Translation Memory reused across the programme and the client’s artwork files proofed. For Changi Airport Group, English web content and literature were taken into Simplified Chinese for Chinese leisure and business travellers, with IPPWORLD’s Shanghai editorial team researching Chinese travel apps and the Singapore team coordinating delivery into the content management system and reviewing existing Chinese content. For Resorts World Sentosa, IPPWORLD is the appointed language service provider to the Digital and Regional Marketing teams, covering the Sitecore website, leaflets, in-market brochures, display advertising and eDMs, in Chinese, Japanese, Bahasa Indonesia, Tamil, Vietnamese, Thai and more, with a Translation Memory maintained per language.

Earlier, the Singapore Tourism Board awarded IPPWORLD a public tender in 2010 for the translation and multilingual production of Singapore’s Heritage Site Markers — destination content of a different kind, with the same requirement that the factual layer be exact and the narrative layer be readable.

IPPWORLD works in 30 languages: 18 Asian, 10 European and two Middle Eastern. At IPPWORLD, we are an award-winning transcreation agency that specialises in creative translation and marketing localisation for the hospitality, travel, lifestyle and retail sectors, named Best Hospitality Creative Translation & Localisation Agency 2019 at the LUXlife Hospitality Awards.

Sequencing and maintenance

Travel sites change on two clocks, and the translation plan has to respect both.

1. Settle the fixed terms. Place names, transport and ticketing vocabulary, product and pass names, in every target language, before anyone writes.
2. Release one. Homepage, the top destination or experience pages, and the booking or ticketing flow.
3. Release two. The itinerary and attraction library, split into transcreated framing and rendered specification.
4. Release three. Help content, conditions, access and transport information, metadata.
5. Operational sync. Agree how a change to a time, price, inclusion or condition propagates to every language edition, and who is accountable for it. This is the step that decides whether the site stays correct.
6. Seasonal maintenance. Campaigns and seasonal content draw on the Translation Memory rather than restarting.

Step five is the one that is usually left unassigned. An out-of-date price in one language edition is not a translation problem, but it will be reported as one.

Conclusion

Website translation for travel brands is two jobs in one site. The inspiration layer has to be rebuilt so that a reader in another culture wants the experience. The operational layer has to be rendered exactly and then kept in sync as the operation changes.

Sort the site into those two categories before scoping, settle place names and ticketing vocabulary as a fixed-term list, split itinerary content so framing and logistics live in different fields, and assign ownership of operational sync before launch.

Travel content that is beautiful and out of date is worse than content that is plain and correct. The point is not to choose.

Frequently Asked Questions

Send your site map, product library and market list and we will mark which surfaces we would transcreate, which we would render exactly, and how the operational sync should work. More on the service is on our website localisation and marketing translation pages, and the sector work in our travel and tourism practice.