A Guide for a Smarter Approach to excel Global Hospitality Marketing using Episerver and Microsoft

Through my several years of experience in localization, I have seen a lot of marketers losing their target due to the delay of publishing their translated offers and packages. Such immediate and urgent translation requests are always very difficult to handle especially if it was created last second before an event or a holiday season. As a result, low-quality content is published after the expected deadline and like this, it loses its efficiency. I am sure many marketers who are reading my article will agree with me.

Practically, here is a repeated scenario: A hotel or a travel agency’s marketing department decides last minute to publish an offer for a limited time. The content author will write it in English, get it approved and publish it to the website. Unfortunately, nowadays, the English audience is just a small part of a brands’ global audience. A message in English only will be ignored by a huge amount of other potential guests: Chinese, French, Italian, Arabic, etc… This means leaving a lot of money on the table. Once published in English, the marketing team will have to immediately send the content to a translation service and have it delivered back on the same day 🏃💨 . The translation company will excel to find a native speaker available to handle the task. Imagine the complexity of this fast turnaround especially when you are dealing with different time zones for example: between China and the MENA region. Or if we are in a holiday season and almost all the offices are closed 😳. What will happen here as a result? The quality of the translation will be screwed by using any available person or translation company that can translate the text regardless of the quality of the service. The translated offer will be delivered back to the hotel or the travel agency and from here the problems will begin… bad quality, missing deadline, the in-house QA team refuses the translation. The Market opportunity is compromised or already gone! 👎⛔❌

Some facts need to be recognized in order to find a suggested realistic solution:

⭐First, even if the top hospitality brands usually have a content strategy and a scheduled publishing plan, there are always some occasions that require to make last-minute changes, publish new urgent offers or news. For example, the announcement of a musical concert in the city.

⭐The second fact is that even if the translation company excels to deliver a high-quality translation on time, at the end this is a human process and mistakes will happen especially when the deadline is very tight. Remember that the basic concept of Marketing is: An offer must be Perfect and Appealing.

⭐The third fact is that the offers and travel packages are always small in word count and therefore it is not complex for translation. Furthermore, now there is the opportunity to create a glossary and upload it to the online translation services. This will help you keep all future translations consistent. For example, you want to keep your brand name in the source language and any other preferred terminologies.

⭐The final fact is the emerging of Machine Translation, Neural Machine Learning, and Artificial Intelligence. It is enough to say that these 3 mega entities are supporting the researches and the maturity of the Smart Translation using artificial intelligence: Amazon, Google, Microsoft. WOW!!! 😮

Let me take Microsoft Translation Services as an example and apply it to the hospitality field. Let’s say the Hotel XYZ has an urgent offer to publish:

English Source:

Exclusive offer, only for 3 days! 15 % discount per night including free access to the Gym and Spa.

Arabic: .عرض حصري ، لمدة 3 أيام فقط! خصم 15 ٪ في الليلة بما في ذلك الدخول المجاني إلى الجيم والسبا

Dutch: Exclusief aanbod, slechts 3 dagen! 15% korting per nacht inclusief gratis toegang tot de fitnessruimte en spa.

French: Offre exclusive, seulement pour 3 jours! 15% de réduction par nuit, y compris l’accès gratuit à la salle de sport et au spa.

I was able to translate this simple offer in just a few seconds. It sounds good. Even if you want to tweak a word or two it will be easy. You just saved a huge amount of time and costs. In addition to huge marketing benefits from publishing your offer on time. The right timing is crucial to maximize the conversion rate. 🤑🤑

How to use Microsoft Translation Services

Microsoft Translator Text API can be easily implemented in any type of applications regardless of the programming language. Translator Text API is a technology type agnostic.

Episerver Example

📌 If you are an Episerver CMS user, then you are LUCKY! It is already implemented there! 🎁 🎁

From the Admin backend, go to Config Tab and click Language Manager. Then select Translator Provider and select Cognitive Service Translator which implements the Microsoft Translator Text API. Then from the front-end download and install Episerver Translate Gadget as following:

Find below a link to one of my previous articles about how to install and use Episerver Languages Gadget.

https://world.episerver.com/blogs/ayman-elbadawy/dates/2019/11/episerver-languages-add-on-2019/

Once the Gadget is installed you just need to select the page where your offer exists. From the Gadget select Auto-translate and you will have your translation in a few seconds 😊✨✨

Now, if you are still concerned 🤔 about the quality of the translation, do the following. From within Episerver, you can setup a  simple translation review workflow. Once the translation is back, an automated notification will be sent to your reviewer whether he/she is in-house or an external reviewer. They will check the quality of the translation, send confirmation and then the offer can be published. Imagine how much time 🕙 you saved. The translation was done in almost no time. No additional effort needs to be done by you, because the Episerver workflow will generate and send out the notifications automatically. The reviewer will handle this small task in less than a few minutes. Also, consider the huge reduction in costs 💲 💲. The Cloud Services price is yet underestimated and is also still free but with a certain limit of usability and character count. The big win here is your successful communication strategy with your audience: Perfect content and on time.

Now, for non-Episerver users, it’s also still very simple to apply the API in your applications to send and receive translation from the cloud services.

What is The Cloud Translation Text APIs?

(A bit technical 💻 starting from here 😊)

It is a RESTfull APIs. (A RESTful API is an application program interface (API) that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data.). In Translation, we only use GET and POST requests.

GET is used to retrieve information about the service such as the language pairs and to retrieve the translations

POST is used to send the content to be translated to the service.

The Service also requires that the Body Message has to be in JSON format.

Also, it is required to have a KEY to be passed in the header of the POST to authorize the request. This will lead us to the next topic:

How to get the Authorization Key?

In order to obtain the authorization key, we need to setup Translator Text in the Azure Portal.

• Access portal.azure.com and login with your credentials (or set up a new account).
• Then, click Create a resource.
• Search for Translator Text
• Click Create
• Enter a unique name, Subscription and Pricing tier. You can select the Free tier which allows up to TWO MILLION characters for free per month. Which are almost near 300,000 words‼️
• Or if your total words count exceeds this amount you can use another smart option with is Pay as you go
• Finally, you can select a resource group or create a new one.

For details step by step guide to setup Translate Text pls check Microsoft Link below:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/cognitive-services/translator/translator-text-how-to-signup

To know how to set up your Azure account from scratch please check the below link for a 3-minutes video from Microsoft.

https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/get-started/?b=16.24

How to test the server?

Once you have the Authorization tool you can do one of the following options:

• Download a RESTful API tool like Fiddler and use it to communicate with the service after inserting the Authorization Key.
• Or if you have a developer in house, a very simple Console Application can be developed in no-time to begin to send content and receive translations.

If needed, I can share in a separated blog, how to setup Fiddler or the development simple code to create a Console App using C# to deal with Microsoft Text API.

To conclude, cloud services including the Smart Machine Translation will dominate in the future. New approaches are not always accepted in the beginning but like any of the previous ideas that succeeded was refused before like Social Media, Smartphones, etc… It is recommended to re-think your Content Management and Translation strategies and consider Cloud Services. It is easy at an early stage to leverage from such services and get familiar with before it is too late.