Improving Translation in Travel and Hospitality: 6 Best Practices to Optimize Costs with AI

Travel and hospitality is a global industry where customer experience is at the forefront of its success. With businesses operating in a wide range of countries and languages, they need to be able to communicate effectively with customers and partners from all over the world. After all, traveling knows no borders and speaks every language.

Translation for marketing enables travel and hospitality businesses to expand into international markets, achieve global success, and connect with an international audience by adapting marketing campaigns and marketing assets to the target audience's cultural expectations and local context. Translating marketing materials, website translation, and adapting marketing content for different markets and local audiences are essential for global marketing efforts.

The benefits of marketing translation include reaching local audiences in their native languages and foreign languages, increasing engagement, and building trust. Professional marketing translation services play a key role, ensuring translation accuracy and cultural sensitivity when translating your marketing across multiple marketing channels and into different languages.

Challenges such as maintaining cultural reference, respecting local culture, and using the local language require careful adaptation to local markets and audience preferences. Multilingual campaigns and marketing translations support international growth and business expansion by making marketing content accessible and relevant to diverse audiences.

AI solutions for translation and multilingual content generation tools have become increasingly popular in the industry due to their ability to provide accurate, timely translations with minimal effort and high-cost optimizations. In this blog post, we look at real-world use cases and provide best practices for getting started with the translation process.

Introduction to Marketing Translation

Translation is much more than simply converting words from one language to another; it’s about conveying the original message, tone, and intent in a way that resonates with a new audience.

In the world of marketing, translation plays a pivotal role in helping businesses connect with diverse global audiences and unlock new markets. Marketing translation involves translating marketing content—such as websites, social media posts, product descriptions, and advertising copy—so that it appeals to people who speak different languages and come from various cultural backgrounds.

The process of translating marketing content ensures that the brand’s message is not just understood, but also feels relevant and engaging to the target audience. By investing in effective marketing translation, businesses can expand their reach beyond one language, making their products and services accessible to a broader, international customer base.

Understanding Cultural Nuances & Cultural Context

A successful marketing translation goes beyond words. It requires a deep understanding of cultural context. Cultural context encompasses the unique values, customs, and references that shape how messages are received in different regions and languages.

When marketing messages are translated without considering cultural nuances, there’s a risk of misinterpretation or even offense. For example, a literal translation of a slogan might lose its impact or convey an unintended meaning in another language.

Professional marketing translators are skilled at identifying and adapting to these cultural differences, ensuring that translated content is both relevant and effective for the target audience. This process involves a thorough understanding of local customs, cultural references, and the subtle language nuances that influence how marketing messages are perceived.

By prioritizing cultural context, businesses can create marketing content that truly resonates with each target market.

Brand Consistency and Voice

Maintaining a consistent brand voice is essential for building trust and recognition, especially when marketing to international audiences. Brand voice refers to the unique tone, language, and personality that a brand uses to communicate with its customers.

In marketing translation, it’s crucial that translated content reflects the same brand voice and maintains brand consistency across all languages and markets. This can be achieved by providing professional marketing translators with a comprehensive style guide that outlines the brand’s preferred tone, terminology, and messaging guidelines.

By doing so, businesses ensure that their marketing materials remain cohesive and recognizable, regardless of the target language. Consistent brand voice in translated content and other marketing materials not only strengthens brand identity but also helps foster loyalty among global customers.

Getting Started with the AI Translation Process for Your Travel and Hospitality Business (and 6 Best Practices to Follow)

With strategic planning and implementation, businesses can maximize their profits while minimizing costs through the use of AI translation. Here are three best practices to keep in mind when starting out with AI-powered marketing translation:

1. Understand Your Requirements

Before selecting an AI translation solution, it is important to understand your specific requirements. Consider factors such as the languages you need to be translated, the scope of services you would like to use (real-time translations, document translations, etc.), and any other specific features you may need. Look for solutions that will help you scale in the future, since this will allow you to increase translation volumes quickly without incurring additional costs.

2. Have Different Translation Methods Available

Depending on your unique business needs, you may want to invest in a solution that offers various translation methods. At LILT, we offer both Instant Translation, which produces machine translations in seconds, and Verified Translation, which sends translated content to LILT for human verification. When content quality is your priority, Verified Translation is great for content translation. When speed or rapid iteration is needed, Instant Translation is your solution.

3. Evaluate Solutions Carefully

When evaluating different AI translation solutions, it is important to consider both performance metrics and cost considerations. Choosing the right translation tool is essential to streamline workflows and support implementing marketing translation at scale.

Pay attention to accuracy rates, latency times, scalability options, as well as any observability (i.e fraud detection) features to detect AI-generated text in data supply chains that can undermine the effectiveness of In-Context Learning.

For high-stakes marketing materials like press releases, relying on professional translators is crucial to ensure translation accuracy and avoid the pitfalls of direct translations or literal translations, which can lead to miscommunication or loss of intended meaning.

4. Leverage Connectors for Scalability

Using Connectors or integrations is a great way to add a new AI tool into your workflow at an affordable price. By automatically integrating into existing systems, Connectors not only reduce friction that is typically associated with adding a new tool, but also eliminate extra steps, and increase translation efficiency.

5. Create Content with Generative AI

In addition to an AI translation solution, you may also benefit from pairing it with a generative AI tool to help you create content from scratch. This technology allows companies to go to market faster with content that resonates with their target audiences.

LILT offers an application called Create that enables regional teams to quickly and directly create brand-aligned, enterprise-grade content and marketing materials in any language. The addition of this app makes the Lilt Contextual AI Platform the first and only existing platform to offer both multilingual content translation and creation. If you’re using a similar generative AI tool, make sure you’re following best practices when prompting LLMs to create content.

6. Train Employees & Monitor Performance

Implementing AI translation tools enables travel businesses to equip their employees with the ability to communicate in multiple languages without the need to hire specialized staff. Leveraging existing business resources and the marketing team can help implement marketing translation effectively, manage international marketing campaigns, and coordinate efforts across various marketing channels.

Once an AI translation solution has been selected and integrated into existing systems or workflows, it is important to ensure that employees understand how to use it correctly. Training should include how to access the tool itself, as well as how to interpret results from its usage. It is also important to monitor performance over time in order to identify areas where training or adjustments may be needed in order for optimal performance of the solution.

Measuring Marketing Translation Effectiveness

To ensure that marketing translation efforts are delivering the desired results, it’s important to measure their effectiveness using clear, data-driven metrics. Key indicators such as engagement and conversion rates, website traffic, and social media interactions can provide valuable insights into how well translated marketing content is resonating with the target audience.

By closely monitoring these metrics, businesses can assess the impact and benefits of marketing translation and make informed adjustments to improve outcomes. Additionally, gathering feedback from potential customers and conducting market research can help identify areas for improvement and refine future translation projects. Leveraging these insights allows businesses to optimize their marketing translation strategies, enhance engagement, and drive better conversion rates in global markets.

Discover the Benefits of Marketing Translation

Today, many teams and leaders are pressured to optimize their translation costs. The good news? By taking these steps to implement a cost-effective AI strategy, businesses can unlock new opportunities by optimizing profits and reducing costs while delivering quality services that modern travelers expect from any business operating in travel and hospitality.

Marketing translation and other professional translation services are essential strategies for achieving international growth and global success in the travel and hospitality industry. Whether you have high volumes of marketing content that need to be translated for the global market or simply need marketing translation services for a specific campaign, discover how LILT can help. Contact us today to book a demo.