A hotel chain: From Majorca to the world

Background

This Spanish hotel chain is one of the largest in the world, with over 90 hotels in major tourist destinations in Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia. It opened its first hotel with a clear mission that still holds true today: to satisfy its customers, listen to their requests and do everything possible to meet their needs.

Target audiences and the power of a good message

The group has a very dynamic website where content is updated almost weekly, which means they need a rapid turnover.

Their customer base is worldwide, so any message they plan to advertise has to be clearly understandable in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Spanish, English, French, German or any other target language.

Many times the hotel chain works with slogans with a double meaning or that play on the sounds of the source language. Naturally, they were finding that literal translations failed to convey the nuances, humour or catchiness of the original. They also detected diminishing sales in some countries.

The challenge

The chain could not afford to lose sales or customers because of slogans that had been badly adapted to the languages and cultures of the different countries it operated in, or hoped to. Refusing to let this happen, it sought to generate authentic messages, in all the necessary languages, that would convey its original slogans’ intended meaning and impact.

Where Tys's assets came in

In cases such as these, Tys turns to transcreation to meet the challenge. We bring to the foreground both the context and special characteristics of the messages’ recipients. We carefully select tone, form and musicality while tenaciously searching for parallel plays on words that work just as well as the original slogans. Only then do the messages truly resound with their target audiences.

The commissions come from the head office, according to season and package: it might be a campaign for Caribbean hotels for a German public, or an offer for accommodation in Beijing aimed at Spanish tourists. The project languages can be from anywhere in the world.

When faced with such a task, the first thing we ask is what the translation will be used for, its shelf-life (using it for a day isn’t the same as for two years), the size of the audience and what kind of public it’s targeting, which helps us determine the register. Once we have this basic information, we are able to assign a team and a process to the project. We make sure to choose the right native speakers, always top-calibre professionals, who know how to give the text the perfect tone and adapt original expressions to each market. We decide on the number of revisions and the level of transcreation required by the project, the tools to use and if a designer needs to be involved to adapt the chain’s branding styles.

Throughout the project’s development, we constantly interact with the chain’s head of marketing to define and fine-tune the changes. It’s as though the client were another member of the Tys team, to make sure we are perfectly in sync.

The result

It is only by following this rigorous process that we have been able to ensure that all of the chain’s customers, everywhere in the world, feel that they are dealing with a friendly local hotel business that they can trust. And most importantly: that no customer feels as though they are reading a translated message or advert, but rather one written especially for them.