Services Rendered

  • Localisation

The Client

In 1919, the client purchased his first hotel in Cisco, Texas. Since that time, the company has grown to encompass over 3,000 hotels and resorts in cities all over the world.

Today, the client owns, manages or franchises a distinguished hotel portfolio.

The Challenge

With hotels in more than 80 countries worldwide, the client is a truly global brand. Having developed an e-learning program on an internal software tool used by all Hilton employees, they needed to record the English audio as well as translate and record the entire course in French and Spanish. For this initiative, they faced a number of challenges.

First, they were legally required to provide the localized versions within a limited time after the English version of the course, necessitating a very fast turnaround. Additionally, the Spanish course would have to meet strict legal translation standards for both Latin America and Spain. The courses themselves contained a great deal of highly technical and specialized language, so the client's localisation provider would need to have an in-depth knowledge of the hotel industry as a whole as well as the client's specific terminology and preferences.

The high volume of repetition in the courses called for a solution that could effectively leverage the repeated text to keep costs to a minimum. Finally, once developed, all three language versions would need to be uploaded to their Learning Management System and undergo thorough linguistic and functional testing prior to release. Based on a long-standing business relationship, they knew that LingArch had the resources and expertise to undertake this challenging project.

The Solution

Drawing on our significant experience in the travel industry, as well as our familiarity with the client’s linguistic preferences gleaned from a long history of working with the company, we carefully selected a team of linguists with the appropriate level of e-learning expertise to complete their e-learning translation services.

This team immediately began creating a series of glossaries and style guides for each language, using translation memory technology to leverage both the high level of repetition in the e-learning courses and the integrated translation services that had been previously completed for the client.

Meanwhile, LingArch’s multimedia translation team provided voice samples from our extensive pool of actors for the client to choose from, so that the voice talent was selected well in advance of the recording. Our expert audio engineers and bilingual supervisors worked to record all three languages simultaneously in our in-house recording studios. Finally, we completed audio post-production and integrated the sound files back into the courseware.

The final, rebuilt courses were thoroughly tested for both functionality and linguistic accuracy by the LingArch’s team, confirming that the translations worked well in the context of the running courses and that the audio matched up with the on-screen text.

In the end, the courses were completed within the stated deadlines, and all three versions met the legal requirements for their respective target markets.