Nissan Iberia communication

I was responsible for localising Nissan's dealer marketing across Spain and Portugal. The brief started narrow (translating catalogues) and grew to cover almost all of the brand's product communication in the peninsula: accessories, audiovisual campaigns, internal information systems and, eventually, Nissan's websites in both markets. The challenge was holding together two languages that pull in opposite directions: the language of technical data, which demands precision, and the language of the end customer, which runs on emotion. And doing so within a structure split between Nissan Europe, which set the strategy, and regional units that applied it in two markets with different realities.

My role shifted from translating texts to overseeing entire localisation projects. I translated into Spanish and, for Portugal, coordinated the Portuguese translators, reviewing their terminology and brand tone before the material went to the client. I also worked with the design team on how to present information in each market, and took part in audiovisual production. I introduced computer-assisted translation tools and the terminology databases shared across the whole organisation, and I designed, from scratch, the digital platforms dealers used to request and receive their materials. In practice I was the link between three environments: Nissan Europe, Spain and Portugal. At European HQ the working language was English, but the team thought in French, and my command of French and Portuguese carried much of that communication.

The work was decided in the details. When I started, I found that the same part could be called "parrilla frontal", "rejilla" or "radiador" depending on the model, and that an accessory shared by several Nissan models changed names from one catalogue to the next. Terminological consistency is what conveys rigour, so I built a system for managing information between departments and product specialists, one where everyone worked with terms reviewed against a single standard. For the brand's in-house technologies, I gathered each market's needs and devised unified terms, rather than letting one technology carry different names from one model to the next. In transcreation, the principle was to move away from English without losing its intent: the Ariya catalogue opened with "Your intelligent connected intuitive drive", three adjectives stacked in front of the noun, English-style. A literal version would have sounded stiff, so, for the Spanish market, I rebuilt it as an enumeration with a rhythm natural to Spanish: "Una conducción más inteligente, más intuitiva y mejor conectada". A tagline isn't translated; it's created anew so it keeps its impact.