Found in Translation

The Most Translated Airline in the World

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Many travel-sector companies rely on translation to increase revenue, and
United Airlines is no exception. United is the world’s leading airline, with
nearly eighty-seven thousand employees and more than seven hundred planes.
It operates in 170 countries around the world, and is one of the few airlines that
flies to all six inhabited continents. So, as you might have guessed, it relies on
translation to serve its customers in the many languages they speak.
In most parts of the world, gone are the days of driving to a travel agency
and printing out paper tickets. These days, it’s all about the web. Booking
flights online reduces costs and wait time. So, understandably, United makes its
website available in multiple languages—exactly eleven of them, in fact, with
plans to add more in the future.
“Each month, we translate between one hundred forty-four thousand and
three hundred fifty-five thousand words into eleven languages,” explains
Theophannie Theodore, senior manager of international reliability—
eCommerce at United.
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However, she points out that not all of the words are
new. Like most savvy companies with experience in translation, rather than
translate every single piece of content from scratch, the company uses
translation software to identify previously translated phrases and sentences.
(We’ll discuss this technology further in
Chapter Seven
.)
The types of content that United translates cover a broad range of subjects,
from informational pages on its website to full-fledged applications that allow
passengers to create a new booking, set up a frequent-flyer account, or update
a profile. “We even translate signs for the airport and check-in kiosks,”
Theodore points out.
Terminology in the airline industry can be especially tricky—just consider
terms like record locator, red-eye, and in-flight entertainment, which do not
have direct translations in many languages. For this reason, each time United
launches a new language, they develop a glossary of airline-specific
nomenclature and terminology related to the travel industry. Terminology can
pose additional challenges when airlines merge, as they often do these days.
But is all of this tedious language work really worth the trouble? Yes,
especially in an increasingly global economy. Theodore cites a clear example:
For many years, the China site had only a basic amount of content translated
into Chinese. If a customer tried to book a ticket, nearly all of the remaining
content was in English. In April 2010, the company launched a translated
version of the booking engine in Chinese. “Within just months after the launch,
we saw ticketed online revenue increase by 300 percent year over year,”
Theophannie points out.
It isn’t so difficult to understand why translation matters in an industry that

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takes people from one country to another. But United links the importance of
translation to an even broader vision. “Translation is important in any industry
that has a global e-commerce presence,” remarks Theodore. “Just think of it
this way: Would you make a purchase on a site in a language that you don’t
understand?” Most of the world would answer with a resounding no.