About
Since it was founded in 1984, Virgin Atlantic Airways has become Britain’s second largest airline serving the world’s major cities. Despite Virgin Atlantic’s growth, the service still remains customer driven with an emphasis on value for money, quality, fun and innovation, an ethos that saw the company become the first airline to offer individual TVs to business class passengers.
Our Translation Services
All Virgin Atlantic passengers now have individual entertainment systems. Housed in the headrest in front of their seat, the systems enable passengers to watch movies and TV programmes, as well as listen to music and play video games.
To maintain Virgin’s high levels of customer service, the on-screen display options need to be available in a host of languages to enable individual passengers to navigate through the entertainment system in their language of choice. In addition the movies, TV programmes and music are required to be in the native language of the destination country.
As the entertainment schedule changes every month, to include the latest releases, Bubbles works with Virgin Atlantic on an on going basis to provide frequent translation services for these systems.
The Challenge
For the entertainment schedule a whole host of information needs to be translated into the native language, including movie names, cast details, synopses, singer’s names and album titles.
Rather than translating these literally, this information needs to conform to established characters and wording in those particular countries, so that the names are easily identifiable.This is a crucial factor when localising names of people, places or movies.
The on-screen displays also need to be localised rather than simply translated, so that passengers using the system find it easy and natural to navigate.
In addition, many target languages are non-Latin (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Hindi, etc.), so the translations have to be produced in a particular software format that is compatible with Virgin’s internal applications.
The Solution
Translation is a combination of art and science – it takes a professional to translate text in such a way that it is not only accurate, but also conveys the same style and tone of the original text, something that a machine will never be able to achieve.
Bubbles therefore provides Virgin Atlantic with a dedicated team of native-speaking and degree-educated translators that, each month, carry out local research to make sure the established characters and wordings for movies and artists are always adhered to.
In addition, the Bubbles Translation Memory tool is used to memorise phrases so translations can be reapplied wherever the phrase appears. This ensures continuity and consistency of style and terminology in wording that is regularly updated, altered or contains the same phrase – in turn delivering enhanced efficiency at a reduced cost.
Added Value
With experience of delivering professional translations in more than 280 distinct languages, Bubbles has worked with Virgin for more than ten years.
As a result Bubbles has established a streamlined approach that delivers translations within just two working days whilst still guaranteeing the highest-level of quality that Virgin Atlantic’s passengers have come to expect.
The smooth process and excellent customer service offered by Bubbles alleviates any unnecessary stress for Virgin as it has the confidence that the translations will be done quickly and to its exacting standards.