Hello everyone!

My name is Cristina and I’m Project Manager in Nóvalo. Today we want to tell how the name of this blog appeared. You may be wondering why it is me and not one of my colleagues who is writing about this. We invite you to keep reading to discover it.

After being informed that Nóvalo was going to take part in the Spain Tech Week in San Francisco, the team started to prepare this mission that would facilitate the scaling of the business to the North American market. Among the main aims, we had to create the new webpage and develop the project management platform, called Tradoo.

While the IT team worked on these tasks, the executive team proposed us a challenge: the choice of the name for these two projects, the blog and the platform. To do this, we would take an active part in a competition for the creation and choice of these names.

The initial idea was to include all our proposals in an Excel file and we will vote for the options we considered the best. After the voting, the winner would enjoy a weekend for two.

We unleashed our creativity! During the week we had to think about the names, everything focused on that. Some of us were less self-confident than others and, although we didn’t know the proposals, we had our own favorites.

The day of the first voting arrived, the name for the platform. In an Excel file we had all the names and we had to award 3, 2 and 1 point to the most convincing proposals. All of them were brilliant. Finally there were three options, two of them belonged to Valentín and Carlos and the third one, to my surprise, was mine!

As this name should have a commercial meaning, after deliberating, the option chosen was Tradoo, created by Carlos.

The blog name was still pending and it allowed us to be more creative, if possible. Once all of our proposals were collected, the die was cast. They turned around the word Nóvalo, Cortázar’s invented language, Babel, plays on words and references belonging to translation.

And the results arrived: “It depends on the context” was the most voted option, and, therefore, I was the winner. Very closely were my colleagues Vanesa and Susana with great proposals. I could enjoy my prize the first weekend of July on the great beaches of Cabo de Gata (Almería). Thank you!

How did I come up with this idea? For quite some time now, I follow different translators’ blogs that allow professionals and college graduates to get an overview of the industry and share ideas. I tried with different combinations with the word Nóvalo, references to translators and project managers and some set phrases that only translators could understand. And that is how I came up with the winner proposal “It depends on the context”, which suits perfectly our blog as we will try to offer different point of views from the different departments in Nóvalo: the PMs, the translators, the reviewers, the administrative department, the technical department, HH.RR., etc.

Nowadays, blogs about translation are a very important tool for translators. Both, the writer and the reader, benefit from this information source, which is becoming essential to keep up to date with the news in this industry, give and receive pieces of advice, contribute to the professional training, share and discuss ideas, etc.

We are all enriching this profession with our contributions, no matter how wide they are. In the last year, the number of blogs has dramatically increased, maybe due to the visibility the translators are always claiming for. However, if something positive must be remarked is that we are not only improving our visibility as professional translators but also we are making us visible and “training” the rest of people, who generally do not know our profession.

In this post, we wanted to show how the choice of a name, which finally is going to represent a brand, can finally be the result of a group work. All the proposals were brilliant and together we chose the best option for our purposes. As indicated in other blogs, such as Traducir&Co, choosing a name is not an easy task, so we hope you enjoy the contents we will present in our blog. We would like to make our contributions, in our case, from an enterprise’s point of view.