The Search: Amtrak Looks for Website Language Management

Part 1 of 2

This Amtrak website language management case study is presented in two parts, the Search and the Success. Both are posted on the MotionPoint case study website, enjoy!

Kathleen Gordon Faced a Challenge

In November of 2005, Kathleen Gordon, Amtrak's Senior Director of eCommerce, had a problem. It was the best kind of problem to have, really: the number of customers riding the company's passenger rail was increasing and online ticket purchases had grown by 800 percent in the past five years. Furthermore, 40 percent of all ticket transactions were happening at Amtrak.com, more than either the traditional station window or kiosk channels.

The problem? Maintaining Amtrak's momentum and stellar success. With more than 24 million Amtrak passengers traveling in 46 U.S. states each year -- and 2006 revenues topping $1.37 billion -- Kathleen and her colleagues knew there was opportunity to leverage Amtrak's online success to connect with a large, growing constituency: its culturally-diverse customers who speak English as a second language.

The solution? Provide online services, information and ticket sales to these audiences in their preferred languages. But while the answer appeared elementary, Amtrak's five year journey to eventually realize that goal was filled with obstacles, technical and financial frustrations, and dead-ends.

The organization knew it could use multi-lingual web communication to grow ridership and revenue if it could deliver four key components:

1. A full translation of its English site

2. A high quality translation

3. A consistent multi-lingual user experience on the website

4. Timely information updates

Amtrak considered starting with a partially translated website and then expanding as time went on. However, Amtrak learned that a full site translation -- including ticket purchase capability -- could be available for only a small incremental cost.

Amtrak’s customers plan trips with time-sensitive connections. Amtrak knew it could not compromise on translation accuracy or timeliness: a lack of clarity on its website could mean missed business meetings, mangled vacations and postponed or forgone family reunions.

Amtrak knew that a consistent user experience is essential to non-native speaking customers who can easily become confused if the information on the website looks or feels different than the information in the station. Ticketing issuance rules, refund policies and travel terms and conditions all must be “in language” to ensure a positive customer experience.

A consistent translation of rules, policies and terms also limited potential legal liability issues.

Amtrak’s English site displays important, time-sensitive information such as weather-related delays and ridership promotions. Amtrak realized fast translation turn-around time would be key to its translated site’s success.

In mid-2005, Amtrak set out to evaluate its options on how to best launch its full website in Spanish. The organization planned a “Phase II” to deploy the site in German.

Initially, Amtrak explored options to build a site in Spanish. It quickly found several significant drawbacks with the traditional parallel site approach:

• A full site translation, including the database-driven ticket purchase application, would take at least 9 months to build and deliver and would require 6+ person-months of IT and web development to re-architect the English site and integrate the Spanish site.

• Automated software translation, also known as “machine translation,” would not meet Amtrak’s needs for translation accuracy. The company found that only highly skilled human translation could provide the quality required to build its brand and satisfy its customers.

• Considerable internal staff would be required after the site was live to notify any translation provider of ongoing changes and to manage the posting and removal of translated content.

• Turn-around time to get translated content could run 5 – 10 days. Rush jobs were possible, but were expensive and required time to manage.

• The update process would be labor intensive, requiring several Amtrak representatives in the translation management chain.

Despite the need for a multi-lingual website, Amtrak concluded that it could not afford the considerable resources needed to launch and maintain a parallel language site. The websites uncompromising standards for quality and responsiveness were too high.

They reluctantly shelved the project.

One year later, MotionPoint Corporation approached Kathleen Gordon, Amtrak’s eCommerce leader, to translate Amtrak’s website into Spanish. MotionPoint’s approach was different.

Ms. Gordon and her team, led by Craig White, were interested. However, because of their experience researching the parallel approach, they were skeptical of several MotionPoint promises, including its ability to:

• Translate, deliver and host Amtrak’s full Spanish site in 3 months with less than 1 day of Amtrak IT / web development time

• Deliver high quality human translations

Automatically find all changes on the English site and translate the changes to the Spanish site within 1 day, with an option for even quicker translation to validate the veracity of MotionPoint’s bold claims, Amtrak had extended conversations with MotionPoint’s technical and account management teams.

It became clear that MotionPoint’s approach, including its Dynamic Language Display™ technology, was a fundamentally different and better way to approach website translation.

Amtrak officially launched the project on November 17, 2006.

Please continue reading part 2 of this series, posted with this article on MotionPoint’s website in the Client / Case study section. Part 2 of 2 details the financial, implementation and ongoing management success of Amtrak’s fully enable, multi-lingual web experience.

Ready to learn how MotionPoint can add languages to your site and drive value from your multi-lingual markets? Call us today at 954-421-0890 or email us at sales@motionpoint.com.