Hilton
Case study

Challenge

• The company’s Safety and Security department oversee safety and security at all properties globally.
• This department rolls out a number of guides and other regulatory documents each year to hotels located in Europe, Asia and MENA; including health and safety policies, natural disaster documents and hotel security documents & policies. Compliance with these guides is vital and local language variants ensure peace of mind on a global level.
• Files for translation vary from guides on what to do in the event of a natural disaster, terrorist attack etc. to safety rules and manuals, as well as presentation slides and many more.
• Content is provided in a mixture of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and InDesign
• As expected with any large multinational business, very quick turnarounds may be required, due to internal deadlines for deployment in properties – specially if a new one is opening.

Approach / Solution

• We quickly analysed all materials shared, to ascertain volumes (100+ pages / 80k+ words). With agreement on deadlines and clearly defined milestones, the approach to be taken was finalised and the project rolled out.
• This process involved obtaining and agreeing on the key translation terminology and the style/tone used within the organisation so that the translators could follow and adhere to this from the outset.
  This means in-country preferences can be incorporated from the very start, which in turn helps to reduce linguistic change requests and speeds up the translation process overall.
• A large dedicated team of linguists was selected to split work between translators to expedite timings.
• Files were delivered on a rolling basis, so client reviewers and then Desktop Publishers could make a start on typesetting whilst other files were still in translation.
• Throughout the translation process, only one proofreader per language was used to check, refine and maintain the consistency of terminology across all content.
• An additional Linguistic sign-off stage was applied at the end of the localisation process, where the senior linguist carried out a final review of all content in context (final layouts) to make sure everything was formatted correctly, nothing was cut-off, missing or wrong.

Benefit

Global Lingo translated over 80,000 words in four weeks, completed all design work, DTP and delivered to the client.

The client received fully localised print-ready materials, by their requested deadlines; including PDF versions and artwork packages, so that they could make any final tweaks internally if they wished to. This allowed them to deploy the documents in the hotels ahead of the deadline.