Hola y buenos dias,
I can’t believe it’s been a year already! Spanish delta.com celebrated its 1 year anniversary a couple weeks ago.
With our international route expansion, translating delta.com into several languages was a top priority over the last twelve months.
And since the launch of Spanish, we’ve also translated the site into German, French, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese.
So what languages do you think we should do next and why?
Saludos,
Jacob Morris
Product Manager
delta.com & self-service
September 7th, 2007 at 10:06 am
Since Delta is focusing on adding a China Route soon and China Southern will be joining Skyteam soon how about Chinese :-).
September 7th, 2007 at 10:08 am
oops i just saw that the chinese translation was already done, my bad.
September 7th, 2007 at 10:14 am
Alright, how about Korean? Korean Air is a Skyteam Partner so a translation would be reasonable.
September 9th, 2007 at 4:03 pm
Well, before adding new languages you might want to think about refining the existing ones…
As a German native I can only tell about the German site, but more often than not the German on de.delta.com sounds a little bit strange - just like the translation had been done by babelfish or google instead of human beings. Sometimes, when trying to figure out what some sentence might be supposed to tell me it even becomes understandible only if I translate it mentally into English… :-/
September 11th, 2007 at 11:23 am
– haggis –
I really appreciate your feedback. We’ve spent lots of time trying to refine the quality over the last several months.
We do use human translators, and I would like to provide them some more details around the translation quality and how it can be improved.
Can you provide me any additional specifics around your experience that might help them improve the translations?
Thanks
Jacob Morris
Product Manager
delta.com & self-service
September 17th, 2007 at 11:58 am
Hello Jacob,
Lovely blog! My mother has been with Delta for 31 years, so it’s great to read about what’s going on with the company, especially at this point in time.
Perhaps your next website language could be into Czech? It seems the ATL-PRG flight is doing well. Or as another reader suggested, you could take a closer look at existing foreign language websites. Website localization might help make the websites feel more natural to their intended users. For example, using the 24-hour clock for European languages instead of AM/PM or listing prices in local currencies.
Anyway, if you happen to have any questions about translation/localization, I work for a language services provider and would be happy to give advice.
Keep up the great work!
Best,
Lauren Nemec