Amtrak.com in deutscher Sprache!

This is probably more in the domain of John Yunker, whose Global by Design site focuses on American companies coming out of their americocentric stupor, but I'll mention that Amtrak's site has been localized into Spanish and German.

This is a hot one. Passenger train travel is not exactly all the rage. The network is not expanding noticeably, and even after Antarctica melts, Americans still aren't going to get out of their cars and take a train, except to amuse their children. Why throw marketing dollars at a localized Web site?

Why Spanish? Because hundreds of thousands of Hispanic Americans need to move from city to city, and if they're going to take the train, it's easier for them to research routes and schedules in their own language. On the other hand, the railroads in Mexico, in particular, are a popular joke, and buses long ago displaced trains as the default means of intercity passenger transportation. So it seems that Amtrak sees the demographic potential, but may have some cultural baggage to overcome in attracting this new ridership, not to mention the issue of whether their sector of the Hispanic market uses the Web (yet).

Why German? Because Germans (and Austrians and Swiss) believe in the trains, I suppose. This is even more intriguing than the Spanish site, because it required more research than simply picking up the newspaper and reading that Hispanic buying power in the U.S. will have risen 347% to almost $1 trillion from 1990 to 2009 ("The Multicultural Economy, 1990-2009", from the Selig Center for Economic Growth). The move to German must have involved polling actual passengers and getting hip to the fact that these people not only think in terms of train travel, but also use the Web to research it.

Both Spanish and German sites are more than mere afterthoughts; they seem to be comprehensively translated, several levels deep. Notes:

• They even translated "California" as "Kalifornien" in the state drop-down menus, no doubt as a nod to the governor.
• Don't use accented characters when you enter your name on the Spanish site. The error message telling you what you did wrong and how to rectify it is still in English.
• I don't know which credit card the Spanish- and German-speaking travelers are likely to use, but the only choices are Visa, MasterCard, AmEx, Diners and Discover. No debit cards, no PayPal.
  

Sometimes the mechanics of a localization project are less compelling than the story behind it. If you know the story behind the Amtrak localizations - or an offbeat story behind a project you've done - please post it here.

(Blogger's note: Travel between San Diego and Los Angeles by car has lost all of its allure, and I opt for Amtrak whenever I can. I have had multiple pleasant conversations in Spanish with people on this train route, usually people from Mexico visiting family in Southern California.)