Nowadays, the travel, tourism and leisure industry has become a driving force in creating economic growth and employment.
According to The World Tourism Organisation, the industry generates about 9% of total GDP and around 235 million jobs in the worldwide economy, which represents 8% of global employment and is becoming one of the largest and most dynamic industries in today’s global economy.
The travel, tourism and leisure industry spans the globe and is based on multinational, if not fully international participants and on cross-cultural communication.
Professional and accurate translation services are essential to both tourism business and its customers.
The tourism industry has become so large that there are now a huge variety of products and services that it offers and which result in an enormous variety of industry related materials that need translations.
Tourist and visitor guides, brochures, magazines, websites, newspaper and web articles, online booking forms, offline and online advertising and marketing materials, visa applications and documentation, audio and video content, legal documentation, reviews, in-flight ad materials, newsletters, correspondence, event management and many more.
Specifics of tourism translations
- Due to the variety of services that the tourism industry offers, translators responsible for providing translation services for this industry are required to have detailed experience, knowledge and understanding in every aspect of tourism markets. Ranging from geography and history, going through culture and art, cuisine and drinks, sports and leisure and ending up with online and offline marketing.
- The language used in most tourism materials is often informal and colloquial.On a wide basis, the tourism business employs the marketing strategy of attracting customers by advertising the real vibes and cultures of a tourist destination. While this strategy is highly effective for the industry, it makes translations quite difficult.
Tourism-related translations have to be performed by in-country translators so that they can truly reflect the local culture in their translations.
The quality of tourism translations directly affects the image of the tourist destination. Wrongly localised translations can result in creating a negative image, not just the destination being advertised but for the whole country, whilst correctly localised messages can bring economic growth for a region/area/country.
The localisation experts, involved in a tourism translation project, have to be familiar with the socio-cultural norms that are associated with the target languages and audiences.
- The internet has transformed the global reach of the travel, tourism and leisure industry.Users can simply review and compare many tourist services and book the desired ones online which means that many companies rely on their online presence to gain customers. As consumers’ online confidence and knowledge expands, it is becoming common for many online users to use not just the services of companies based in their country but also those companies based abroad. This means that translations are playing an increasingly vital role in helping companies to achieve international growth. Therefore the demand for quality and services to the travel, tourism and leisure industry has sky-rocketed in recent years, ranging from website translation to localisation to full multilingual localisation and SEO campaigns in 30+ languages.
