A CHINESE translation firm has launched in the Lake District to tap into a growing interest from Far Eastern visitors.

Three staff set up the service to provide North West tourism businesses with Cantonese and Mandarin website content and marketing material.

The firm has already scooped a contract with English Lakes Hotels, which has six businesses across Cumbria and north Lancashire.

Tourism website director Peter Scott, 72, of Bowness, runs wordsworthcountry. com and began offering translations after noting a large rise in website hits from abroad.

His daughter-in-law ‘Brenda’ Scott, who is originally from Taiwan, has helped the business scoop contracts.

“The Chinese interest in Cumbria is really growing. Our website gets 150 hits a day from Chinese visitors and the numbers keep increasing all the time,” said Mr Scott.

Colin Fox, group market-ing manager for English Lakes Hotels, said it was up to companies to make themselves accessible.

“We must make ourselves attractive to different cultures, languages and traditions. We have been used to a large Japanese tourism market in the Lakes but that has depleted over recent months,” he said.

“But other Asian markets are growing and there’s work to be done in order to find out exactly what to offer Far Eastern markets.”

Ian Stephens, managing director of Cumbria Tourism, said: ''Cumbria Tourism regularly meets with its members, Visit England and Visit Britain, and we are working closely together to look at specific ways of engaging with new and emerging markets specifically; Russia, Brazil, India, China, Malaysia, Taiwan and South Korea. Our long-term strategy aims to target the entire Asian sphere of influence alongside other emerging economies."Mr Scott’s son and Brenda’s husband David, 46, joins them in the business and brings with him extensive travel expertise from Europe and China from his career as an aircraft engineer.

The couple now live in France where David works for airline companies Lufthansa and Swiss International Air Lines.