What are the best practices for translation of city/state names for international SEO? (ie. New York in English vs. Nueva York in Spanish)

[JonClark15]

I'm working on international SEO / translation of a global travel site. While we have a global keyword research and translation strategy in process for each market they serve, I've run into a unique question. Overall, we are translating (and localizing) content for each market but aren't sure what to do with location names.

Each country/state has cities and locations that have their own dedicated pages. I see three options for these location names (when titling a page and writing content):  keep them in English, translate the names in the market languages, or use a combination of the two.

The challenge with altering the location names to the market languages is that they are truly not known by those names. Though there are some instances where it may make sense…for instance **New York **in Spanish would be "Nueva York" with **‘**Nueva' being the Spanish translation of ‘new’. There are other instances, where no translation exists.

If you’ve had a similar experience I'd love to hear your approach/recommendation.

[LesleyPaone]

Don't translate proper names. Especially things like New York, I would be willing to bet that everyone has heard of that. But I take the stance to not translate proper nouns, it dilutes the word and causes confusion.

[TranslateMediaLtd]

While I agree with Lesley that it's best not to translate the proper nouns associated with place names - it's not always as simple as that. For instance, the Spanish island of Mallorca is mostly referred to as Majorca in the UK. So in these situations I would go for the version that is most widely understood (and searched for) in the target region.