[retroafroman]

I remember they pitched Mongolia as a place this would be used, but I fail to see how it actually would be. I haven't been back to Mongolia since this came out, but I would bet good money that no one (besides whatever government entity signed onto (bribed/schmoozed) the project) would use this. English isn't that common among nomads that it would make any sense. Everyone knows the Latin alphabet, but reading and writing is all in Mongolian Cyrillic, so it doesn't even make sense that way.

In the cities (where the large majority of the population lives) in the organized ger districts, there are street names and numbers, so this is really a solution in search of a problem.

[yoube]

Not necessarily. While Ulaanbaatar does have street numbers and such, they're not well-known and are basically never used when giving out directions/advertising. It's more like: The "yellow building to the right side of the big department store". Official addresses also rarely use street names, it's more like: Flat #5, Apartment #2, Microdistrict #4, Sukhbaatar District.

So in reality everyone just uses Post Office Boxes for mail, who often just call you and say mail's arrived and charge 400 tugrug.

That said, no-one I know has even heard about what3words, aside from those who read the initial press release. And I'm from Mongolia.

[gexcolo]

Hey, weird ask, but I am going to be visiting Mongolia in 3 months with a small group of online pals. Want to be friends? My email is on my profile!

[chrisrhoden]

It is localized to other languages, as explained in the article.

One of the complaints in the article is that the different localizations offer uneven quality.

[duskwuff]

> One of the complaints in the article is that the different localizations offer uneven quality.

And there's no publicly documented way to convert between the localizations. It's not even clear that there's a 1:1 correspondence between the word lists!

[rtkwe]

It's clear in the article that the lists don't map so you can't even translate between them without going back to W3W and running it through their stuff.

> So, if I want to tell a French speaker where ///mile.crazy.shade is, I have to use ///embouchure.adjuger.saladier

> Loosely translated back as ///mouth.award.bowl an entirely different location!

[duskwuff]

It's no great surprise that the words don't translate. But what I'm asking is it's possible to infer a word-to-word mapping along the lines of

    English   French
    -------   ------
       mile = embouchure
      crazy = adjuger
      shade = saladier

or if the mapping is weird enough that even that doesn't work.

[fredzel]

Just checked that by changing last phrase in Polish, than changing language to English. It doesn't work:

"plomba.rewelacja.oczy" => "exclaim.mainland.engages"

"plomba.rewelacja.fasada" => "dare.lawn.sleepy"

[cpeterso]

What Three Words has a couple YouTube videos about Mongol Post's usage of W3W addresses:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GM3foOLQwS4