The localisation of a museum’s website is a crucial process for ensuring the accessibility of cultural content to an international audience. By translating the texts and adapting the content to the specific linguistic and cultural needs of different countries, the museum can reach a wider audience and offer a more complete and engaging virtual visitor experience. In this article, we will explore the project carried out for a prominent museum complex. 

The Client 

The client is a nationally recognised museum that attracts hundreds of thousands of visitors each year. 

Project Overview 

The client requested the translation of their showcase website (CMS: Adobe Experience Manager) from Italian to English, including all pages relating to the museum’s various locations, information sections such as the events calendar or visitor instructions, and descriptive sections relating to exhibitions, collections, or artwork captions, totalling 95,000 words. 

The Team 

For this project, we formed a team composed of: 

• 1 Innovation Manager 
• 1 Project Manager 
• 3 native English translators specialising in marketing and communications with knowledge of the art world 
• 2 revisers 

Challenges 

The two main challenges of this project were file format and timing. 
In terms of file format, the client’s IT department extracted the website structure and the relevant files in .xml format with tags and parts not to be translated. After this, around a hundred folders of files, all named .content.xml, had to be imported into the memoQ CAT tool, making them almost indistinguishable from each other. 
In terms of timing, the translation was required within a very tight timeframe during the holiday season, with a demanding pace and frequent changes in delivery priorities due to content go-live requirements. 

The Solution 

To address the file format issue, the Innovation Manager and our Revisers’ coordinator worked together to create filters in the CAT tool that, once the files were imported, would isolate only the translatable content while preserving the original structure. Post-translation testing was carried out using specialised software to detect encoding errors and ensure that the structure of the .xml files remained intact. 
In terms of time constraints, a team of translators was carefully selected based on their expertise and stylistic skills, and the Project Manager held frequent planning meetings with the client. 

The Result 

The translation import was successful, and all deadlines were met as planned.