I was reading the Buenos Aires Herald today, and in the top right corner was an ad for American Airlines. They had a url advertised: AA.com/espanol

Now - do people in Argentina (and Buenos Aires) speak Spanish? Sure. But like most major languages, it has its own dialect. In Argentina they call it Castellano (speaking of which - the ‘ll’ is pronounced as a ‘j’ here). So while AA took the effort to create a Spanish version, in a way it was half-assed - that isn’t what they call the language locally here. And that isn’t factoring in the even more varied/slang version of Castalleno unique to Buenos Aires itself.

Continuing on in that tradition there are quite a few words in Spanish that make no sense here, or have a completely different meaning. For example, in Spanish you is ‘tu’ but here it is ‘vos’. Another common one is a word that means ‘to pick’ means ‘to have sex with’ here - imagine the confusion that can cause.

This little ad made me think of the actual localization problems local has. For example - as a local from Toronto, we pronounce it as ‘Torono’ - that ‘t’ is obviously slowing us down and we had to remove it. But say we had a sales team from one centralized location - do we lose subconscious points with a potential client because our sales team doesn’t drop the t?

If I’m in Chicago and I ask for pizza - do they assume ‘Chicago-style’ pizza or ‘American pizza’ (which is not like ‘Italian pizza’ … and don’t even get me started on what passes as ‘Argentinean pizza’). I keep hearing how many people think of ‘hoover’ to be the equivalent of ‘vacuum cleaner’, just like ‘kleenex’ is to ’tissue paper’. But in some places - not true (I honestly have never made that connection myself).

This becomes extremely important when building up language taxonomies to build a relationship between a business/category and words used by people to associate with that location.

Just another headache in the local space - localizing user language.