A Case Study: La Falda Lures Tourists

Thank you to translator Barbara A. who worked on this project.

Background

During the last five years, the Municipality of La Falda in Argentina saw rapid growth in its influx of foreign tourists. La Falda is a city located in the province of Córdoba, Argentina where the main economic activity is tourism. The authorities decided to carry out a campaign to distribute information to foreign tourists and hopefully attract them to their city. In order to so, they decided to translate all their tourism brochures into English in addition to other languages.

Key Client Needs

The project consisted of translating a total of five brochures. The information they included was general information about the city, facts about the city, places to visit and how to get there, where to eat, where to stay and information about festivals and other special events.

The translator was asked to produce a translation that is attractive, in the sense that she had to “sell” the city and its attractions as products. To do this, she began to research American and English brochures (the source and target language) so as to fully “plunge in” to the English/American speaking world and utilize the vocabulary and terms used in their tourism trade. She also checked cities that are similar to La Falda and that have the same economic goal–selling their attractions and tourism. The translator paid attention to the grammatical constructions, to the vocabulary used, to the register and to as many details as possible. It was very important to work with what translators call “parallel texts” because parallel texts allow you to understand how specific genres and special phrases work in a foreign language. The result is a translation that gives the same message and impression to all readers in any language.

Results

Thanks to the translation, all the information about the city was made available for English-speaking visitors who wanted to spend some days in La Falda. The customer was very happy and satisfied with the work. By offering all the tourism information in English, now the scope of tourists that could go to the city and easily get around was larger, which brought about huge benefits to tourism in general.

Tags: Argentina, english, expert translators, languages, spanish, translation

Category: Business Translation