On the eve of the Olympic Games, which will be held in the capital of France next year, the Paris Metro has launched a translation application that will help ‘lost’ foreign visitors to navigate the city’s transport system with as few problems as possible.
The intricate subway with more than 300 stations, the names of which are difficult to find and even more difficult to pronounce even for the local population, easily becomes a nightmare for those who do not speak French fluently.
The Summer Olympics, which will be held in the French capital between July 26 and August 11, will bring millions of visitors there who do not know French, and some do not even speak English.
Most of them will use public transport to get to the sports fields.
Therefore, the city authorities decided to introduce an application called Tradivia, for translation from and into 16 world languages. The RATP subway operator equipped 6,000 of its employees at the city’s transport stations with it.
The app translates questions from English, German, Mandarin, Hindi and Arabic into French. Users of the application send translated questions to RATP agents, whose answers are then translated into the visitor’s language.
“We have detected a problem. Namely, you cannot expect our employees and agents to respond to inquiries in all world languages,” said Valerie Gaidot, head of customer service at RATP.
They expect 15 million visitors: This will help to use the Paris Metro and recognize the names of the stations…
The application is specially adapted for the use of the Paris metro and recognizes the names of stations, travel and route planning, as well as the names of various types of train tickets that can confuse tourists.
RATP said that this is a key advantage over general translation assistance, such as Google Translate, which often fails to ‘understand’ or properly translate terminology related to terms related to metro travel.
After the experimental introduction of the new application on three city lines, the operator introduced the service in the entire transport city network during the summer.
Around 15 million visitors are expected in Paris and the surrounding regions during the Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games.