New feature: multi-lingual booking widget and guest emails

Multi-lingual support released this morning for booking widget and guest emails. You can now take online bookings, and correspond with guests, in their local language.

We've slapped a "Beta" label on this feature. That means you'll probably find niggly errors still: mistranslations, or snippets of English appearing in hidden-away corners of the booking process. If you find such errors, just let us know and we'll fix them quickly.

Here's how it works. If you want to enable a different language for your booking widget, go to Settings > Online Bookings Settings > Your Details and Enable multi-lingual:

Select the language(s) you need and save. We've translated already the static text that appears in the widget (like "Please select your arrival date"), but you'll need to provide translations for things like your room names, and the text of the email that goes out to guests.

Once you've enabled multi-lingual, you'll see a new option to manage translations for each room and extra:

If you leave anything blank, we'll just use the English instead.

(The 'Describe as' field, by the way, is used to populate the pricing description. So instead of saying "€75/room/night" we'd display "€75/chambre/nuit". "Nuit" is translated by us. "Chambre" comes from your translation of the 'describe as' field. So if you are renting rooms or villas or campervans or tropical islands, you can have the correct terminology in all languages.)

You'll also need to provide translations of your guest emails (booking confirmations and so on). You'll find you can now do that under Settings > Emails:

Finally, you can use a custom widget (Settings > Online Bookings > Customise size and basic options) to display a particular language by default:

 The language of the widget that the guest used to book is recorded, so they'll then get all their emails in their local language:

You can also manually assign a guest to a particular language, so that telephone bookers can also have emails sent in their local language:

OK, I think that covers it.

Thank you to all those users who contributed to the translation effort. If you find anything that you think is mistranslated, then please let us know and we'll fix it right away.