I was involved in the pre-launch work of a global map application. I was to manage the Latam languages. The project was straightforward but very large, so I put together a team of Portuguese and Spanish linguists to work simultaneously.

The job was extremely simple: places around the world needed to be localized for users who selected Spanish or Portuguese UIs.

New York: Nueva York

London: Londres

But once the major destinations were done, it got complicated: Tahrir Square, in Cairo, means “liberation square”, but no taxi driver would understand “Plaza de la Liberación”. We needed the best term for navigation purposes, in addition to recognition. Search and research results were often ambiguous or yielded antiquated names. Our criteria to determine the most authoritative and relevant terms kept shifting, frustrating workers.

We finally agreed that search engine key words were the most authoritative source: the costlier term was more likely to be most relevant for users. We shared an AdWords account and went to work: whenever necessary, we looked up terms and used the highest ranking one.

The strategy released the team from ever changing criteria, spending up up work and reducing costs. The best part? Seeing our work live and in use.