The City of Amsterdam asked us to take on the large-scale translation of their new English-language website, which called for a collaborative, intuitive approach and our in-depth knowledge of the local municipality.
The client
Gemeente Amsterdam, known in English as the City of Amsterdam, is the municipal government for Amsterdam. Its website is the city’s main digital portal, providing access to the latest official information for citizens, focussed on essential services such as municipal registration, work and income, housing, healthcare and policy.
The brief
Until 2017, their content was presented solely in Dutch, while I amsterdam’s 'Living' site was used as the English-language voice of the city. As it was deemed counter-intuitive to use one website for Dutch-speaking users and a separate website for international newcomers who are not yet fluent in Dutch, the decision was taken to host all official information from the City of Amsterdam on one website, requiring a large-scale translation project.
The strategy
EdenFrost worked closely with the City of Amsterdam team in the months leading up to, as well as during, the project. The first task was to examine the existing English-language content and consider what should move to the new site. For the translation, we developed a workflow with the client’s Dutch editorial team and our professional English translators, receiving batches of content, collating this in a dedicated document management system, and ensuring it was all translated and reviewed on schedule.
The result
In addition to delivering accurate and reliable English translation, our team of dedicated translators helped to make small corrections and recommended a number of refinements across the Dutch content. The updated English website went live in January 2018 with 100,000 words of new English content, paired closely with refreshed Dutch content.
Our services
- Accurate, professional
- Advice and consultation, fact-checking and document management
- Ongoing translation of weekly news articles, press releases and policy documents