The tourism industry is one of the most important industries in the world. Millions of people travel each year for business and pleasure purposes. As UNWTO secretary general, Zurab Pololikashvili, stated: “The growth of tourism in recent years confirms that the sector is today one of the most powerful drivers of economic growth and development“.
Tourism operators invest in translation in an attempt to promote their services and operations to customers all over the world. In order to succeed, they rely on marketing professionals to have their promotional material translated in many different languages.

Why marketing translators are the best option?

Let’s take a look at 4 main reasons why tourism needs marketing translators.

1. Marketing translators offer more than just translation

Technical translators can be very unreliable when it comes to marketing copy. The successful adaptation of marketing copy to different cultures requires a deep and comprehensive understanding of the target audience as well as the knowledge of how the source message is going to be conveyed in another language and culture.

In simple terms, marketing translators have their way with words. They can detect idioms and colloquialisms and they know how to translate nuances of the target language. While excellent technical translators have to be accurate and as faithful as possible to the source text, marketing translators need to be focused on brand identity, meaning, tone of voice, style and register.

In a nutshell, marketing translators provide information in a way that not only educates, but it also delights, persuades and, ultimately, turns prospects into customers with only the power of words.

2. Marketing translation includes transcreation

Marketing content for tourism can be very tricky as it may contain plain and everyday language but the meaning can be very hard to translate. Material for tourism can also contain humour, puns and visuals. Even register can vary as there are formal and informal marketing texts serving different purposes.

All these kinds of texts need a more creative approach. Transcreation can be the best option in taking all these concepts overseas without sacrificing creativity and markedness in language.

Marketing translators can also be good transcreators as they both need to research the local market, localise elements and consider how to make the content more meaningful and persuasive to the target audience.

3. Marketing translators know how to improve SEO ranking

As the whole nature of the travel and tourism industry is based on communicating to all languages and cultures in order to persuade people to travel across the world, the web it is without a doubt an integral part of the promotional process.

Websites, online booking systems, online magazines and restaurant menus are only a few examples of the amount of material which require translation for the web. Marketing translators who understand Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) can help increase the visibility or your material and push it to the top of search engine rankings.

If you don’t have good SEO, you probably won’t be able to reach out to the prospects you’re aiming at.

4. Marketing translators create a better overall customer experience

It goes without saying that this is the exact essence of marketing translation; to give tourists and travellers the best possible experience.

According to ABTA Holiday Habits Report 2018, “81% of people booked their holiday online”. This means that people are searching on the internet looking for information from a huge variety of online sources and they finally decide on destination, accommodation, transport, activities in order to plan their own holidays.

However, some of this material is badly translated and create an unpleasant experience for the readers that they finally abandon the site. Let’s be honest, no one trusts badly translated content. And this is where marketing translation comes in. Travel and tourism businesses need an experienced marketing professional translator they can trust with their content.

Good marketing translators can help visitors get all the information they need quickly, while they create a beautiful bigger picture crafted with the right words in order to convince them to take a certain action, for instance buy a specific holiday package.

“The global economy is set to grow 3.5 per cent in 2019 from 3.7 per cent in 2018”, the IMF said in a report.

As travelling trends for 2019 point to strong outbound travel from emerging markets (Greece is one of the top tourism destinations for 2019 as European Commission sees 2.2% growth for Greece in 2019), you need to take all necessary steps in order to obtain a bigger slice of the constantly growing travel and tourism industry.

Anastasia