A campaign launched by Marketing Drenthe in 2018 to attract more Germans to the province has been a resounding success, despite the German-language visitors site relying on Google Translate.
Translation by Traci White
Dagblad van het Noorden reports that besuchdrenthe.de, the German-language site for visitors to the province, has proven a success, despite numerous awkward language mistakes due to Google Translate.
Astrid Crum from Marketing Drenthe told the Dagblad that the provincial marketing agency was not exactly pleased by the literally and illogical translations on the site, “but it wound up helping us out in the end. It’s helped to make business owners more aware of just how important it is to make sure their information was available in good German.”
Nearly two million tourists visited the province last year, which was an increase of six percent over 2017. The biggest foreign group to visit the province came from Germany: 185,000 people made the trip across the border in 2018, which is double the numbers from five years ago. Visitors from the Belgian region of Flanders were reportedly the second largest foreign tourist group.
German and Belgian guests in particular tend to stay in hotels and bungalows in the province as opposed to the camp sites in Drenthe: there were more than 7 million overnight stays in 2018.
Photo source: besuchdrenthe.de
