The e-mail was little more than a one-liner, but it stung all the same. “Why do you assume all of your readers are based in the United States?” it demanded.
I had written an online column about an American carrier’s excess luggage policy and cited a couple of cases that were specific to the United States. My account was accurate but, as the zinger so aptly implied, incomplete.
I’m not one to gripe about the bundle of hate mail that fills my in box every week. It’s just that I’ve written volumes on the virtues of keeping travel content international and, if possible, multilingual. I felt like a hypocrite.
If the approaching travel season, which will bring a flood of foreign visitors to our most popular destinations, isn’t enough to remind us that it’s a World Wide Web, then try a little math. A recent Cyber Stats Internet census counted 53.5 million Americans online, while the Computer Industry Almanac estimated 148 million worldwide users. Meaning that only slightly more than a third of all Internet users live inside the United States.
The Internet knows no national boundaries, as some online travel companies are learning. Many new customers might be in Latin America, which is one of the fastest-growing online markets today, says Martha E. Galindo, president of Galindo Publicidad, a Coral Springs, Fla., translation company. Reaching that audience has to be more than a knee-jerk reaction.
“When it comes to American content providers tailoring their content to the Latin American market, the Web is a mess,” she says. “People are doing things that are laughable.” For example, many developers are falling back on computer translation efforts when they internationalize their sites. Big mistake, says Galindo.
Take an ordinary word dear to our hearts: “cost.” A computer translation of the word to “coste” would be fine for Spain, but the preferred Latin American term is “costo,” according to Galindo. “There’s no substitute for a person reviewing the site before it’s published,” she cautions.
Some companies are taking a different tack, shifting the “burden” of internationalization to the client side of the equation. Firms such as Transparent Language, Hollis, N.H., offer applications, like the soon-to-be-introduced Desktop Translator, that will rewrite HTML automatically into a preferred language as a page is downloaded.
“The translations aren’t perfect,” says spokesman Jay Marciano, “but they’re good.” But computational language expert Kevin Hendzel, at Aset in Arlington, Va., says language is so context-dependent that no computer can accurately interpret a Web page without a human to correct the problems. “When you run something through a translator program, you can get the gist of what’s being said, but it’s more or less unintelligible English,” he says.
No surprise, then, that a company such as Berlitz has seen a 60 percent increase in its interpreting business during the last four years. The market for intelligent multilingual content is booming as the Web becomes the international medium it was intended to be. Still, many key travel sites remain English-only — not out of an ethnocentric conviction, but because their operators either don’t know any better or are deterred by the high cost of taking their content global.
They need to start down the road. Content internationalization is more of a journey than a destination.
✓ Get the latest travel news, tips and commentary from Elliott’s E-Mail, the subversive newsletter from industry gadfly Christopher Elliott. You’ll travel like a pro. Sign up here. It’s free.
Sign up for my 
