One Hour Translation Blog

Last October, I took a short vacation from work, and headed with my girlfriend to Tuscany, Italy. We both do not now Italian, so we had to plan our way in English. We both spend quite a lot of our time on the Internet, so it was obvious we will reserve rooms online.

We firstly thought this would be an easy task to do, but we had a few surprises:

1.    Most of the small, cute little Zimmer rooms in which we were so interested didn’t have English interfaces on their websites. Therefore, we had to skip them. I’m sure we skipped some good ones.

2.    Even those who had an English interface, could not answer our questions in English when we contacted them.

3.    In many cases, even when we found an English room reservation system, the directions page was again in Italian.

Our immediate response was: “what a waste”.

Those small businesses wasted their money on bringing a potential customer to their website. Although we wanted to buy, we had no other choice but to turn back and search for English-friendly alternative. I remember I was wondering why a small hostel owner – which is located in the center of touristic paradise – would want his main revenue source to go away from his website ?

This was not the end, by the way. During our stay we faced many other small challenges:

1.    Menus written in Italian only. In the center of Venice! I’m not kidding!

2.    Information brochures and commercials for tourists we found inside our rooms were again in Italian solely.

3.    Painting explanation signs inside museums were in Italian only.

4.    Car rental agreement… Common! We had no idea what we sign on !

5.    Et cetera.

Our vacation was great after all. Those small details cannot spoil this amazing country.

But they could make our lives so much easier.