Tourist Organisation of Belgrade
The challenge
Belgrade’s official tourist organisation wanted to make foreign guests in Serbia’s capital feel welcome. Naturally, they needed their website and brochures to read in immaculate English, so that’s why they turned to us.
The English-language version of the TOB website was functional, but evidently not translated by native speakers of English, something which would be apparent to any reader proficient in English. This wasn’t good enough and might have even been detrimental to Belgrade’s promotional efforts as a tourist destination, and so TOB decided to turn to us to produce a high-quality translation of the complete website.
Translating Belgrade
Translating an entire website is no small task. An organisation like TOB and a tourist destination with a long history like Belgrade have an entire vocabulary and terminology of their own. The project involved meticulously researching history, people, places and, in particular, the name of every tourist site in order to ensure consistency with existing usage. Where there were no existing names in use, we coined new ones with the agreement of TOB. We like to think that the TOB site will now become the standard with which others will comply as far as Belgrade tourist terminology is concerned, and indeed we already know of cases where the site has been used for reference purposes.
Because of the size of the project it also had to be divided between various team members, with a main editor appointed to ensure internal consistency. The entire site, some 50,000 words, was translated, proof-read, re-edited by the original translator and then edited for a final time, the whole project taking some five weeks to complete.
TOB now has an English-language website which it and Belgrade can truly be proud of. Odista welcomes you to Belgrade!
Disclaimer: Changes have subsequently been made to the TOB website regarding which Odista was not consulted and so we no longer claim credit or responsibility for materials which may be found on the site.
