Translating your tour

Once your tour has been published in English, with the help of our editor, you can start translating it into other languages. Our user interface supports seventeen of them at the time of writing, and there are more on the way.

Before you start working on a translation, reach out to your editor so that they can give you some guidance on the languages you're considering and walk you through the process. If you won't be doing the translation and audio recording yourself, they can also help connect you with one of our existing publishers or someone we've worked with before to provide these services.

When you translate a tour, it's important to ensure that the experience is consistent across languages. To do that, you need to pay close attention to the maximum audio length of each location, how you give directions, and the voice of the narrator.

Maximum audio length and word counts

You'll recall that the length of a location's script is determined by the distance between two locations and the speed at which a listener walks. The maximum audio length for a location is the same for all languages, but word counts vary because some languages use more or fewer words than English to express the same ideas.

As a rough guide:

• German, French, and Spanish tend to use about 10–20% more words than English
• Italian and Portuguese are similar to French and Spanish
• Japanese and Chinese tend to use fewer words but take roughly the same time to speak

Your translator should aim to match the audio length rather than doing a word-for-word translation.

Directions

Directions are especially important to get right in translation. Make sure your translator walks the route themselves if possible, or at least reviews the directions using Street View. A direction that makes perfect sense in English might be confusing or ambiguous when translated literally.

Voice and recording

The narrator for your translated tour should match the tone and energy of the original. If your English tour is warm and conversational, the translated version should be too. A stiff, formal reading will feel out of place, regardless of how accurate the translation is.

Using codes for reference

We recommend adding codes to each paragraph of the translation. These codes allow anyone working on the tour — the translator, the audio editor, or you — to refer to specific parts of the tour without needing to understand the language of the translation.

When you export a tour from Mapmaker, the script already has the following:

• Location title
• Maximum word count in English
• Maximum audio length

All you need to do is add codes to each paragraph (e.g. A110, A111, etc.). This makes it much easier for the audio editor to match the translation to the correct sections.