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Teaching a map to think in two languages at once

jul 2026 · 8 min

Teaching a map to think in two languages at once

"وين أقرب صيدلية مفتوحة؟" should work exactly as well as the English. That sentence is the whole brief for Navvo search.

Bilingual is not translation

Users mix scripts inside one query, transliterate street names, and use colloquial forms that no gazetteer contains. Translating the query and running it against an English index loses all of that. Both languages have to be first-class in the index itself.

Arriving at the door

Routing to a coordinate is solved. Arriving is not. A pin on a building is useless if the entrance is around the back, the compound has one gate, or the shop is on the first floor.

Navvo carries entrance-level detail so the last fifty metres are described the way a person would describe them, in the language the driver is already speaking.

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