Do you know me, mascarita?
This year, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Carnival is pulling for internationalisation and has invited us to hop on their float in the exhilarating parade alongside the Sociedad de Promoción de LPGC (LPGC Promotion Society) and LPA Visit.
Social Media Internationalisation
We eagerly started off the project in an explosion of colourful ideas for our approach regarding the new international social networks for Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Carnival. We opted to be different, that is, creating new profiles on Facebook and Twitter, but keeping the same Instagram account. Our foreign followers demand certain information that locals don’t so, our social media profiles necessarily need to be different.
When the project sparked off, we worked on naming our social media accounts, ultimately deciding to go along with the brand that had already been designed years before for the Spanish version. LPACarnival is now the Carnival brand aimed at tourists and the city’s international community. We decided to use mostly Spanish hashtags due to the fact that the international community following carnival-related social networks is still quite small so, they wouldn’t create such an impact.
“Sharing is caring”, so they say. That’s why we decided to help the teams in charge of managing the social media profiles right from the start by giving them a list of translations of common expressions used during the galas and contests. This way, the Carnival community manager won’t have to wait for the translator’s approval during the hectic live shows; although, we’ll always be there to answer the community’s queries directly in their own language.
Web Localisation
Content Translation
The Las Palmas de Gran Canaria Carnival website had previously worked on creating content in English, but this year, we’ve decided to tweak it here and there, completely revising the articles and also adding new languages to the list, such as French, Italian and German, especially on the most relevant pages for international followers. Both tourists on the island and those planning their upcoming holidays, visited our pages on Carnival Queens, Drag Queens, event programmes, and –the most sought-after information of all– how to get tickets for the shows.
During the fiestas, we also translated key articles into English on the Carnival website as well as on LPA Visit, the city’s tourist information page, thus showing the entire world the day-to-day of our renowned celebration.
Localisation with Joomla
At Etnonautas we directly take on the entire process of launching a multilingual website and blog. This means that not only do we upload content on the website, but we make sure that the URL structure is optimal for its correct internationalisation, language tool configuration, html typesetting for articles, entries, modules and menus in the different languages, hyperlinking, setting date formats, and editing language files in the various plug-ins and components used on the website.
Just like creating a costume, we’ve worked long and hard, paying attention to the slightest detail so that every word, button or link is exactly as it needs to be.
Now, as we put our costumes away and start the countdown for next year, we’ll continue translating and localising projects just as exciting, but with a bit less glitter, *sigh*.