Background
Located in a spectacular setting at the foot of the Rocky Mountains, Denver is one of America's fastest growing cities -- and one of its most exciting. The 'Mile High City' entertains over 8.8 million visitors a year with people coming to enjoy the city's outstanding cultural attractions, museums, shopping, dining and nightlife.
Denver Metro Convention & Visitors Bureau (DMCVB) is a destination marketing organisation. It is responsible for promoting the Denver metropolitan area and the rest of Colorado as a meeting and vacation destination to local, national, and international travellers, meeting planners and conventioneers.
DMCVB sees its website as an economical means to get information to potential international visitors who are considering Denver as a destination. Amongst the international visitors that Denver attracts, many come from non-English speaking parts of the world, including Germany, Latin & South America, Japan, and Korea. Acutely aware of the need to make its website www.denver.org multilingual, DMCVB looked for a foreign language solution to its website for about two years before it finally discovered WorldLingo's Website Translator. The solution has now made it possible for international visitors to get information about Denver in their own language instantly.
The challenge
Whilst DMCVB had long recognized the importance of multilingual content on its official visitors website, it had been difficult to find a cost effective translation solution to make the website available in different languages. Concerns about cost and timescales had proved to be barriers to any significant progress.
John Taylor, DMCVB's VP of finance and administration said, "We delayed the decision for years because we believed that to have the website translated into six different languages would require huge resources and very deep pockets. Despite this, we persevered in our search for a suitable solution that would match our requirements and our budget. It was when www.denvergov.com the website of the City of Denver, added WorldLingo's Instant Website Translator to its own website that we decided to take a closer look at the solution. We reviewed the service and liked what we saw."
WorldLingo's Solution
Prior to choosing WorldLingo, DMCVB looked at a number of translation services including translations.com, O'sullivan website translations, and some bespoke hard coded website translation offerings. John Taylor comments, "Ease of use, quick implementation and affordability were key to our decision making process, but the supplier we had looked at couldn't deliver in all these areas. Not only did WorldLingo meet all our criteria, but its impressive track record meant that the decision to choose WorldLingo was easy."
DMCVB chose WorldLingo's Website Translator, which allows multilingual visitors to view an entire website in their own language with a single click of a mouse button.
The Website Translator is a web based solution which is extremely simple to implement, because its software code is simply cut and pasted into destination web pages. Updates to translations happen dynamically whenever modifications are made to the website's contents. This makes it easy to maintain the website. The implementation on www.denver.org provides an accurate machine translation service that translates the original English into ten languages; French; German; Italian; Spanish; Portuguese (Brazilian); Dutch; Korean; Chinese; Japanese; and Greek. Flag identifiers on the website's home page make it simple for visitors to select the translation that they require.
Results
With Website Translator, communication with multilingual visitors to Denver has been far more effective than previously possible. Denver's Visitor Information Centers, in particular, have been able to overcome the language barrier and offer a better service by referring multilingual visitors to web pages in their own language.
John Taylor comments, "It's early days so far, but we do know that translations are being requested from our website and its traffic continues to increase. Furthermore we feel that multilingual capability has given our website an edge that many other official visitor sites lack. It has helped particularly in our Visitor Information Centers, where we are better able to assist our non-English speaking visitors. We are also able to refer international phone and mail enquiries to our website for better service."
As for the future, DMCVB will continue to improve its multilingual online services, making it easy for people anywhere in the world to plan their visit to the Mile High City. John Taylor concludes, "We believe that more and more people will be driven to the Internet for their travel planning. Any future efforts and/or refinement will be concentrated in this area and multilingual capability will be integral to the process."
Read more about the Website Translator.