Auto vs. Manual Translation for Hotel Compendiums

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Picture this: guests effortlessly accessing your digital hotel compendium in their preferred language, no matter where they are during their stay.

For years, properties have struggled to provide multilingual guest directories, often limiting translations to only a few essential details.

The process to manually translate is time-consuming, expensive, and frequently restricted to English, leaving many guests without the personalized experience they deserve.

But what if you could break these barriers? What if translating your guest directory into multiple languages was fast, affordable, and seamlessly integrated into your compendium solution?

Enter the Hinfo Auto Translate service — built into our powerful Content Management System (CMS) — designed to revolutionize how properties connect with their diverse guests, while saving time and cutting costs.

Benefits of Multi-Language Compendiums

Before diving into how our Auto Translate service compares to traditional translation methods, it's important to first understand why offering your compendium in multiple languages is a game-changer.

When given the option, people naturally prefer consuming content and communicating in their native language. This preference is evident in everyday activities:

• Watching TV shows and movies,
• Sending instant messages and emails,
• Making phone calls,
• Posting on social media.

For independent travelers and couples, having your compendium details available in their preferred language becomes invaluable.

Even if guests have some English proficiency, providing localized content ensures they can fully understand your property's services and offerings.

By supporting multiple languages, you not only enhance the guest experience but also boost revenue opportunities for services like room service.

It's a simple yet impactful way to elevate your hotel's branding, appeal to international travelers, and gain an edge over competitors.

Significant Time Savings

Here's how our Auto Translate service stacks up against the traditional manual approach to translating your compendium details.

The Manual Process:

Manually translating your compendium involves several time-consuming steps:

1. Compile a document with all the details you want to translate.
2. Find a qualified translator for each required language.
3. Send the details to the translators and wait—often a week or more—for the translations to be completed.
4. Manually distribute the translated details using your current compendium format, whether through paper copies, in-room TVs, or hotel tablets.

Depending on your property's size, the compendium solution in use and the volume of details, this process can take anywhere from a few hours to several days or even a few weeks.

The Hinfo Auto Translate Advantage:

With our Auto Translate service integrated into the Hinfo CMS, supporting multiple languages is effortless and takes less than 10 minutes:

1. Navigate to the Languages section in the CMS and select the languages you want to support.
2. Publish your compendium details in English. The chosen languages are translated instantly in the background and saved for guest access.

Gone are the days of costly, labor-intensive workflows.

With Auto Translate, making your compendium accessible in multiple languages is fast, efficient, and hassle-free.

Significant Cost Savings

Translating your compendiums details manually, is typically charged on a word count basis rather than an hourly rate.

Factors to consider when manually translating details are - costs, the number of details to translate, who is translating for you and which languages you are translating to.

As a guide, one of our Hinfo demo properties, has a word count of 6,600 for details that are translatable. This does not include phone numbers, street addresses and web addresses.

This table compares the costs to translate your compendium details either automatically or manually, for a 50 room property on a per language basis.

Details	Hinfo Auto Translate	Manually Translate
Translating Cost	$48 per language per year	Average of $300 per language
Labour for your property at $25 per hour.	10mins of your staff time/salary to set up all languages.	$300 for 12hrs of additional work at the property's end distribute to each room.
Grand Total	$48.00 per language per year	$600.00 initial cost only per language

All costs are in Australian Dollars and are excluding GST.

The Hinfo Auto Translate service would allow you to support 12 additional languages for slightly less than the cost to manually translate and distribute details for 1 language.

Our Auto Translate service supports the following languages to translate to from English:

Upgrading to Hinfo also eliminates the additional costs to provide compendiums in multiple languages in each room. This also eliminates the labour to apply these translated details in each guest room.

Benefits of the Hinfo Auto Translate Service

The Hinfo Auto Translate service is an optional feature packed with benefits that far surpass the traditional manual translation process.

Unlimited Updates

Update your compendium details as often as needed, and translations are automatically updated when published — all within our Fair Use Policy.

Instant Auto Updates

Whenever you make changes, translations are automatically applied to the supported languages, ensuring your guests always have the most up-to-date information in real time.

Automatic Language Detection

Hinfo seamlessly detects the language pre-set on your guests' smartphones or tablets.

If their language is supported, the matching details are downloaded instantly.

For unsupported languages, Hinfo defaults to English.

Guest Messaging in Any Language

Through the built-in Ask Reception Guest Messaging service, guests can send messages in their preferred language.

These are translated into English for your reception staff, and your responses are translated back into the guest's language—creating effortless two-way communication.

With these powerful features, Hinfo Auto Translate not only simplifies multilingual support but also remains significantly more time and cost-effective than manual translation methods.

Date of Publishing: 31st March 2020

Date Last Updated: 1st January 2026

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