Tourism increased in Spain in 2015. Tourisms from all over the world choose Spain as their holiday destination, and, as we’ll see in this post, this is good news for translators. The first step when planning a trip is looking for information. FITUR (the Spanish International Tourism Trade Fair) will be held in Madrid from 20 to 24 January. The new developments for the coming season, such as the main wholesales’ catalogues, will be presented. This is a unique opportunity and the place to be for potential tourists who want to be well informed.
[Sharer]However, most trips are planned from home, viewing interesting sources that help you at every step, from booking your flight to selecting the hotel to stay. This is where translation becomes the potential tourist’s best ally, as most people prefer to read information in their own language. Having to use dictionaries or asking your English-speaking grandchild can be annoying for a Spanish OAP who wants to visit the English countryside, for example.
One outstanding hotel search website iswww.booking.com, which has information in more than 40 languages, distinguishing between Brazilian and Continental Portuguese and between British and American English, for example, and which provides quality contents.
When booking flights, rental cars, and other travel options, www.expedia.es can be helpful, as the website contents are translated into 30 languages.
Cruise lovers are probably familiar with www.logitravel.com. This website is translated to much fewer languages, but its blog, which is often updated, is also translated to those language.
One website that is translated into 13 language but has no blog is www.vacaciones-espana.es, which provides attractive visual contents for potential visitors to Spain – but which includes some unforgivable misspellings.
Other type of tourists can visit www.viajeros.com, which has forums, articles, and travel diaries, but is only in Spanish, so a large part of the world population misses its contents for linguistic reasons.
These 5 sources are a mere sample of all the resources that someone preparing a trip can use. Their linguistic analysis shows that, in the same way as a tourism website should be visually attractive, their translation into several languages should be a requirement, so that any tourist could go beyond the surface.
Tourism is an area in which cultures, places, and languages meet, and translators are the professionals who make communication and understanding possible, not only when preparing your trip but also during the stay in your destination.
In case any potential tourist is tempted to use Google Translator to prepare their trip, they should read this article, which tells how this ineffective tool almost managed to scare tourists away from Galicia.
