Marketing Example

In 2002 Scottish Highland Tours were faced with the twin problems of the impact on tourism of the Foot and Mouth outbreak in the UK and the New York September 11th disaster, as a result of which they have had to contend with a major down turn in traditional visitor numbers.

Managing Director Robin Worsnop began a process of web site localisation, which offset much of the impact of this downturn. In total they translated around 10,000 words of text from their web site into Spanish, Italian, German, French and Dutch; the languages of their key European markets. Robin’s view is that even if their European clients search the Internet in English, they feel much more appreciated if they discover their mother tongue on the web site.

They commissioned a careful selection of their website to be translated, including the home page, key information pages, detailed itineraries and historical information on Scotland, to ensure that visitors could optimise their visit through both generic and historic pages.

Robin’s view is that going for a translation of single pages of a website would not be worthwhile expenditure unless it dealt with “must have” items for a visitor. Where a website is offering add-on items for a potential tourist visitor the localisation does need to be more extensive and offer more information.

As Robin says, “On the Internet people prefer to use their own language on search engines. They only revert to English if they can’t find it in their own language.” The effects of this investment in a multilingual presence have been reassuringly solid.

“From our baseline performance in English, we saw an increase in traffic of about 50% in the first three months. Particularly for Spanish where there was an almost instant effect. Clients gather information from the website and then phone in bookings or walk in through the door, often clutching print outs in their own language from the site.”

“We get a lot of business from the Trade through the web site. Even Travel Operators whose staff speak perfect English still prefer to access the site in their native language. They can then scan text much more quickly in their own language and that speeds up information gathering.”

“Languages break down a massive barrier in the mind of the person overseas - it shows we are making an effort and that is a rarity in the UK. When we made the website multilingual, it was a difficult time for tourism businesses in Scotland and without this move we would have found it much more difficult. During this period we in fact managed to increase our turnover by 15-20% and the multilingual website was a significant driver in this.”

The whole process has given added greatly to what they do, and provided another value added item. They now have the translations on the mini-coaches, which makes it a more accessible service for those for whom English is a second language.

Robin's team review the number of languages on the site and are now considering Swedish in order to develop into the Scandinavian market. Thus far they have chosen not to translate all the pages since some of it is live and constantly changing, but that might be a future direction for them to explore.

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Anna Bowman Translations Ltd have helps many tourist attractions, hotels and tour companies with their multilingual marketing requirements. Our translated guides can be found in such places as Windsor Castle and St. Paul's Cathedral and we have many long term contracts working as technical language partners for tour magazines and hotels.

To learn more about the possibilities that multilingual marketing can open up, and to investigate the different options available for your organisation, please feel free to contact us.