HORECA World: Boosting your Industry with Tourism Translation

horeca world touristic translation

HORECA World: Boosting your Industry with Tourism Translation


If you work in this field, you surely know what we’re talking about when we refer to the HORECA world; if, on the other hand, you have no idea what we’re talking about, fear not! In today’s article we’ll explain everything about this world and take a look at the possible benefits localization can bring to its services.

Have you ever heard of the HORECA world? In essence, it’s an acronym that groups the hotellerie-restaurant-café industry and all the related services. A field which inevitably relates to tourism translation.

But why would the HORECA world need professional tourism translation?

Imagine this scenario: you’re a tourist walking through the streets of the historic centre of Rome and, after a long day spent exploring the sights of the Eternal City, you’re looking for a restaurant where you can enjoy a nice dinner. As you walk around, you find a very inviting trattoria, but here’s where the problems immediately begin: the waiter inviting customers in suggests yet another rip-off, and the menu posted outside the restaurant is only in Italian.

So what do you do in this circumstance?

If the restaurant really attracted you, perhaps you’ll try to roughly decipher the menu with a machine translation tool. But what are the chances of this happening? It’s instead much more likely that it’ll be easier to proceed directly to the next locale, given the large supply of restaurants in the area.

horeca touristic translationsHowever, let’s continue to use our imaginations and assume that you actually choose to stay: once you’ve tried to automatically translate the menu, you decide to order some delicious macarons, expecting a typical French dessert that can revive you after your day as a tourist.

When the waiter arrives with your order, however, it’s a surprise! The French macarons were actually Italian maccheroni pasta.

In light of this, you’ll surely remember that dinner as an unpleasant experience in the future. And to think that it could have been very different if only the menu had been accurately translated by the restaurant!

If you work in the HORECA world, therefore, it’s clear that a good tourism translation for your services is not only desirable but also necessary, and that leaving it in the invisible hands of an online translator may prove even more counterproductive than having no translation at all.

Let us stay for a moment with the scenario we just described. In this case, in addition to solid language skills, the restaurant menu translator should also have (or rather, should have had!) excellent knowledge of the source and target cultures and enough critical intelligence – not artificial – to foresee the cultural misinterpretation, adopting or proposing strategies to avoid it (e.g., choosing to add an image for each dish, or a more precise explanation of culture-specific terms).

As you’ve likely realised, then, translating a menu is by no means a trivial process, but rather a complex yet necessary operation to continue to attract new customers. The same concept, though of course with different variations, also applies to hotel, restaurant or bar websites.

 

Does the HORECA world really need special translation?

Nowadays, anyone working in the HORECA world who wants to attract the attention of new customers should have a brochure or, to be even more current, a web page that appropriately describes their facility and services in several languages.

In an age when most people bypass the mediation of a travel agency to plan their holiday, not having a presence online and with ad hoc translations automatically means precluding an important part of the market, cutting off what will represent the majority of customers in the future.

Think, for example, of what would happen if museums didn’t have English translations of artwork descriptions available, if the website of the hotel where you want to stay didn’t have a multilingual option, or worse, if the translations were present, but incorrect and misleading.

These are just a few scenarios that illustrate how much the HORECA world needs tourism translation (and, in some cases, also translation for eCommerce), as well as how complex this work is – and should therefore be entirely entrusted to professionals in the field.

Talking about the benefits of translation for the HORECA world, we might ask: what definitively prompts a tourist to book a stay at a particular hotel rather than another?

In general, we can say that the first determining factor remains, even today, good old word of mouth. In second place, then, Online Travel Agencies play an increasingly important role, as they deal with the online organisation of travel (and of which we have already revealed all the secrets). Therefore, it becomes essential to ensure that your tourism company ranks well on search engines so that it is among the first alternatives viewed by users searching for information on the Web.

 

Why the HORECA world needs comprehensive translation services

horeca world comprehensive servicesHaving established the importance of search engines, we cannot fail to refer to the ubiquitous SEO, the dreaded search engine optimisation – which, of course, will have to be different and customised according to the language.

If you’re not entirely clear on what SEO is, let us explain: in essence, Search Engine Optimisation is what determines your ranking within a search engine’s results page through the use of a set of keywords that are tailored to a given language and culture.

An experienced translator often optimises texts and web pages for SEO independently so that they are perfectly suited to the target culture: having a website for your business is of little use without a worthy ranking within search engines.

 

Conclusions

If you work in the HORECA industry, especially if you’re in a tourist location, it’s essential to have a good tourist translation, which is important both to retain customers and to expand your clientele.

This is of course true for any company that wants to enter a global market, but it becomes even more relevant if that market is tourism.

In conclusion, therefore, it’s best to not leave anything to chance and rely on professionals to take care of all the necessary aspects to make this investment count.

If you work in the HORECA world and would like to expand and retain your customer base through multilingual SEO, contact us without any obligations: we will be happy to answer all your questions and work out a customised strategy together.


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