Let them read your house in their own language.

Translating is not sticking a flag in the corner

The quick trick of dropping an automatic translator into a corner shows, and it shows exactly where it hurts: in the description of the house, which is what decides the booking. Machine-translated text reads oddly, and odd, in accommodation, reads as careless.

Each language has its own written version, with its own address. It is not the same page with an ornament on top: it is the same site told three times.

And for the search engine, three equivalent pages

When a site exists in several languages, the search engine has to be told that these are the same page in different versions rather than repeated content. That gets declared in the code of each page and is what lets a British traveller land on the English version rather than a half-translated Spanish one.

What gets translated and what does not

Everything the traveller needs in order to decide and to arrive: the description, the amenities, the house rules, how to get there, the terms and the form. What never gets translated are the proper names of the village, the street or the local festival: somebody searching for «Sant Joan» is searching for that, not for «Saint John».

Answering in their language too

An English website is not much use if the reply to the form arrives in Spanish. Confirmations and automatic messages go out in the language they were written in, and that gets set up once and works from then on.