Client Success Story: Putting Location Technology on the Map

Native-language mapping makes location technology company the first choice for navigation.

The accuracy of the geospatial data used in location technology relates to how precisely a map conforms to the real world.

We rely on mapping technology to move people, goods, and organizations safely and efficiently from A to B.

It could be, for example, a journey through a busy city, across a crowded continent, or to the other side of the globe. Either way, the quality of that data is crucial.

So, when the company behind the world’s number-one location platform needed to create detailed mapping data in a variety of languages, they didn’t need a map to locate the best team for the job.

The Challenge

A Netherlands-based company has a mission to make transport safer and smarter.

They’ve seen their initial ambition of creating digitized maps and in-car navigation systems extend beyond private transport to an array of vehicles across a diverse range of industries.

This pioneering company pride themselves on bringing together data and tools from multiple sources while upholding unfailing standards of accuracy, privacy, and compliance with data-protection laws and regulations.

With over 9,000 employees across 56 countries, they are a truly global company. Additionally, over 150 million vehicles around the world use their mapping products and services.

This expansion in the use of their products and services has involved phenomenal amounts of data regarding locations, road names, and places of interest—all of which required translation.

The scale and complexity of this translation task was huge, and presented the company with three problems:

1. There were multiple combinations of source and target languages, some of which are relatively uncommon.
2. To ensure accuracy in each location, we needed a native knowledge of naming conventions, directions, and how navigation systems work.
3. The details must be updated on maps in real time. Translation speed was as crucial as accuracy.

The undertaking, therefore, was far more challenging than a typical translation project.

That’s why the company reached out to Summa Linguae Technologies (SLT).

The Solution

Our first task was to carry out a quantitative and qualitative assessment of the task at hand. After that, the client supplied a database containing all relevant terms in a variety of languages.

For instance, the approximate number of places of interest (PoI) and road-names for each language combination was as follows:

• English-to-Thai: 150,000 PoI
• Arabic-to-French: 10,000 PoI
• French-to-Arabic: 10,000 PoI
• Amharic: 8,000 road names
• German, Swedish, Dutch, Pinyin, Chinese: Various small volumes

Each piece of text was allocated a maximum time for translation and implementation.

The allocations were either 12 hours, 24 hours, 36 hours, 48 hours, or 6 working days. We assigned managers to ensure no detail was overlooked.

SLT also collaborated with many of the product’s end-users, mostly subject matter experts. They provided valuable information regarding priorities, criticality, and quality expectations.

Native speakers were sourced for each language that were not only skilled linguists, but also knowledgeable regarding their region’s topography and navigation.

Each piece of source data was then passed through a rigorous process of translation and/or transliteration. That refers to the transferring a word from the alphabet of one language into a more familiar one to aid readability and pronunciation).

All details (such as spelling and grammar) were then verified before the new data was added to the live maps.

The Outcome

Above all, our solution succeeded in providing the client with:

• Comprehensive place-of-interest data in users’ own languages.
• Accurate and detailed geospatial tagging, resulting in near real-time updates on maps and the navigation system.

Madhu Sundaramurthy is the Managing Director APAC at SLT. She further explains key factors that enable such a successful solution within very tight deadlines: