Multilingual marketing for travel agencies starts with choosing languages by who books, not by where the trip goes. Then write each version for its reader instead of translating word for word, use a typeface that carries each script, mirror right-to-left layouts, write numbers and dates the reader's way, keep one design for every version, and have a native reader check each file before it is posted.
Each of those is a decision you can make once and reuse. Here they are in order.
Which languages should you market in?
The destination's language tells you almost nothing about who buys. What tells you is evidence you already hold.
| Signal | What it tells you | What to do |
|---|---|---|
| The language enquiries arrive in | People already choose it to talk to you | Market in it first |
| Your clients' nationalities | Who has booked before | Greetings and offers for those communities, in their language |
| Your partner agencies' markets | What the trade reads | Trade material in the language agencies work in, often not the traveller's |
| A festival you greet | The community that keeps it | The greeting in their language; the offer in the language they book in |
| The destination's language | Very little about who buys | Rarely a reason on its own |
Start with the language most enquiries come in. Add a second when you can check it, and a third only when someone can read it natively. A language you cannot check is a risk you publish every day.
Markets and languages are not the same list. One country can need several languages, and one language can serve several countries. iTravel Studio's calendar, for example, suggests the countries you sell to from what the account already keeps (its own country, its contacts' nationalities and its agencies' countries), and the festival posts page shows how it turns those markets into dates. Which languages each market reads is still your call. The same choice applies to quick formats such as WhatsApp status updates: post them in the language your clients write to you in.
Should you translate, or write it again?
Both, depending on the line.
- Facts translate exactly. Price, dates, inclusions, nights, the conditions. These must say the same thing in every version, because a price claim in one language is a price claim in all of them (travel advertising price rules explains why).
- Hooks are written again. A headline that works through a pun or a rhyme in English becomes flat or strange when translated. Give the writer the idea and the length, not the English words. The trade calls this transcreation.
- Greetings use the phrase people say. A festival greeting translated literally reads like a form letter. Ask someone who keeps the festival what they would write to a friend.
- Trade words come from a glossary. "Twin share", "per person", "half board", "on request": decide each one once per language, write it down, and reuse it. Without a glossary, three posts give the same basis three different names.
Plan for length. German and Tamil headlines often run far longer than the English; Chinese and Japanese run shorter. A layout should be built for the longest version, not the first.
Scripts, typefaces and right-to-left layouts
A typeface that carries the script
A Latin typeface has no Arabic, Devanagari or Thai letters in it. Use one for a Hindi headline and the system substitutes whatever it has, or draws empty boxes. Choose a display and text pair for each writing system you publish in, and treat them as part of your brand, as the travel agency brand kit post describes.
Three more script rules catch people out.
- Line height. Arabic, Devanagari and Thai need taller lines than English, and Urdu written in Nastaliq needs much taller ones. Squeeze them and the marks above and below the letters collide.
- Capitals, italics and letter-spacing. Many scripts have no capitals and no true italics, and spacing out Arabic letters breaks the joins between them. A style that suits an English headline can damage the same headline in another script.
- Turkish and the dotted i. Turkish capitalises i as İ. A design that upper-cases text must know the text is Turkish.
Right-to-left layouts
Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Hebrew read from right to left, and so should the layout: the headline starts on the right and the eye ends where the call to action sits. A mirrored layout is not a flipped picture, though. Logos stay as they are. Phone numbers, email addresses and web addresses stay left to right inside right-to-left text, and without care they come out scrambled, with the plus sign at the wrong end. The W3C's article on bidirectional text in HTML explains why a number next to text of the other direction gets pulled into it, and how isolating it fixes that.
Look at the photos as well. When a layout mirrors, a photo may flip with it, and a reversed shop sign or a mirrored skyline is the first thing a native reader notices.
Numbers, prices and dates the reader's way
The same figure is grouped differently by language. One hundred and thirty thousand is 130,000 in English, 1,30,000 in Indian English and Hindi, 130.000 in German and 130 000 in French. A price grouped the foreign way looks wrong to the reader even when it is right.
- Currency. Use the code (AED, INR, USD) where a symbol could be read as another currency. "$" means several.
- Dates. 03/04 is 3 April to one reader and March 4 to another. Write the month as a word.
- Weekends and holidays. The working week differs by market, which changes what counts as a long weekend; long weekend travel promotions works through it.
One design in several languages
The practical way to run several languages is one design that holds every version, not one file per language. In Studio, each text in a design holds its words per language, and the editor switches between the 32 languages iTravel offers. A text with no words yet in the language you switch to shows its English words if it has them, or nothing, and before a download the check counts them: "2 texts have no words in this language yet." You choose the language when you download, and the caption Studio drafts for the post is kept per language too, with its hashtags joined the way each script joins them.
Under that, Studio applies the script rules above. You choose a font pair per writing system on the Brand page, and Studio picks the right pair for each language. It sets a minimum line height per script, leaves out capitals, italics and letter-spacing in the scripts that should not have them, mirrors the layout for Arabic, Persian, Urdu and Hebrew while keeping logos as they are (photos mirror with the layout, so look at each one), and keeps the phone number, email and website of your contact line left to right in every language. Words are fitted to their box on your own device for each language before the file is made. Resizing a design to other sizes carries every language's words with it.
What Studio does not do is translate. Its template words start in English; you, or the person you trust, write the other languages. Studio is in early access, and the travel flyer maker page describes the rest.
A worked example: one offer in three languages
Say an agency in Dubai posts a 4-night offer to three audiences: English, Arabic and Hindi. One design, three versions.
| Part of the post | English | Arabic | Hindi |
|---|---|---|---|
| Layout | Left to right | Mirrored: headline on the right | Left to right |
| Headline | Written in English | Written again in Arabic, from the idea, not the English words | Written again in Hindi |
| Price | "From AED 2,450" | The same figure and code | The same figure and code |
| Price basis | "per person, twin share" | The agreed glossary term | The agreed glossary term |
| Dates | "Travel 1 to 30 November" | The month as a word | The month as a word |
| Phone and website | As typed | Kept left to right inside the Arabic | As typed |
| Typeface | The Latin pair | The Arabic pair | The Devanagari pair |
| Check | Read by the writer | Read by a native Arabic reader | Read by a native Hindi reader |
Notice what changed and what did not. The facts are identical in all three. The words that sell are written three times. The layout changes in one. And the longest step is the last row, which is the step people skip.
If the post also goes out as a story and a printed flyer, the same three versions follow into each size; social media image sizes for travel covers which sizes to make.
Checking with a native reader
A native reader catches what no software can: a greeting that sounds like a bank, a trade term nobody uses, a word broken badly across two lines, a date that reads the wrong way round.
- Send them the exported file, not a text document. Line breaks, mirroring and fonts only show in the picture.
- Ask specific questions. Does the headline sound like us? Is the price basis clear? Would you book from this?
- Put their fixes into the glossary, so the next post starts right.
- Give them time before the festival, not the night before it.
Before a multilingual post goes out: a checklist
- [ ] The languages were chosen from enquiries, clients and partners, not from the destination.
- [ ] Facts (price, basis, dates, inclusions, conditions) say the same in every version.
- [ ] Headlines and greetings were written for each language, not translated word for word.
- [ ] Trade terms come from your glossary.
- [ ] Each script has its own typeface pair, and nothing shows as boxes.
- [ ] Line heights are tall enough for the script; no capitals, italics or spacing where the script has none.
- [ ] Right-to-left versions are mirrored, with logos, phone numbers and web addresses reading correctly.
- [ ] No photo shows reversed writing after mirroring.
- [ ] Prices use the reader's grouping and a currency code; months are written as words.
- [ ] Every text has words in every language you publish, small print included.
- [ ] A native reader has seen the exported file of each version.
