Virgin Limited Edition goes global…

Website translation case study

Virgin is one of the most exciting brands in the world, with a reputation for excellence and a unique culture across its diverse range of businesses. The Virgin group incorporates travel, mobile phones, financial services, leisure, retail, and music companies.

Virgin Limited Edition is Sir Richard Branson's collection of stunning retreats. "Limited Edition" usually implies something extraordinary and rare which offers something better, more exclusive and more desirable..., that's exactly what Virgin Limited Edition does! www.virginlimitededition.co.uk

Challenge

Renowned for offering the utmost in luxury, Virgin Limited Edition wanted to better meet the needs of its international customers and increase guest satisfaction by making the Virgin Limited Edition website available to its customers in French, German and Spanish.

The project included translation of marketing information regarding each of the properties, plus “special offers”, “how to book” “what’s new”, and numerous attachments. Various file formats were used, including: XML, QuarkXpress™, Adobe InDesign™ and MS Word™, amounting to in excess of 200,000 words.

Post-translation processing of the website source files would be handled by Virgin Limited Edition’s web designers.

In addition to the initial translations required to take the site live, the project would be ongoing, involving the translation of regular updates to web content.

Approach and solution

Aware that Virgin Galactic had entrusted a similar website translation project to Lloyd International Translations (LIT), Virgin Limited Edition approached LIT to deliver a cost effective and timely solution.

LIT use qualified linguists who translate into their mother tongue and are fully immersed in their own cultures to ensure that localization issues are avoided.

In order to ensure that Virgin Limited Edition’s message would be professionally conveyed in each of the target languages, LIT tailored its processes to incorporate a pre-live website language signoff stage, handled by translators. This approach would ensure that text would be in-context, adopting a style sympathetic to the Virgin brand and its target audience. LIT would project manage the final pre-launch changes, in conjunction with Virgin Limited Edition’s web designers.

Results and benefits

LIT acted as an extension to the Virgin Limited Edition marketing team, providing an end-to-end service, comprising project management, translation and final website linguistic checks. Delivering the project in batches had a measurable time benefit for Virgin Limited Edition, with all parties involved working hand-in-hand to deliver the project on time and within budget.

A translation memory database was generated as a bi-product of handling the website localization project for Virgin Limited Edition. Other marketing projects involving non-web content, such as sales and marketing collateral will be routinely analysed against the existing translations database, to ensure consistency and minimise costs going forward.

According to Claire Fraser, a member of the Virgin Limited Edition marketing team, “Lloyd International has been an outstanding agency to work with on our multi-language website translation project. It’s been a pleasure dealing with such a friendly team who are driven to deliver high quality work on time, every time. They definitely exceeded my expectations and I wouldn’t hesitate working on projects with them again in the future.”