Thomas Bros. Makes New Inroads With Planned Spanish-Language Street Guides

To newcomers, Southern California can seem like an immense place. This is mainly because it is an immense place.

Now, imagine having to negotiate that sprawl without the help of a map. Or at least a map you can understand. That’s exactly the challenge many of the area’s newest residents have long had to face because few map companies offer their products in any language other than English.

Warren Wilson, owner of Thomas Bros. Maps, maker of some of the nation’s most popular street guides, decided to fill that void. As a result, in January the 83-year-old company will for the first time issue versions of its Los Angeles and Orange county map books in Spanish.

Wilson has no illusions that these maps will lead to buried treasure. In fact, at least initially, the company expects to lose money. But, then, the project wasn’t initiated because it would make dollars. It was initiated because it made sense.

“We are a minority-owned business, and [the owner] says we need to do more things for the community,” said Jim Welch, vice president of marketing for the Irvine-based firm. “So that was the driving force. Surprisingly enough, nobody’s doing it, not that we’ve been able to find.”

There’s ample reason for that. Research by Thomas Bros. showed that Latinos’ driving habits often differ from those of the community at large. Commutes are frequently shorter, for example, and more time is spent around the home, so drives are usually confined to well-known routes. Longer trips are generally made for a specific purpose, and folding maps, rather than the highly detailed Thomas Bros. Street Guides, usually provide enough information for those journeys.

But the study’s most troubling finding showed that even those drivers who needed the information Thomas Bros. provides were not using the guides. For years, the guides have included a simple half-page primer in Spanish, but that wasn’t enough to help customers navigate the complex directory.

“Some of the research we did came back and said that, in some cases, the Spanish-speaking community does not use the Thomas Guide simply because they don’t understand it,” Welch said. “And we said, ‘Well, gosh, how can we make them understand?’ ”

Although the company began thinking about a Spanish-language guide more than a year ago, the project didn’t really get started until May. Translators--some working in-house, others supplied by an outside vendor--took the existing guide and simply began interpreting the text. Street and city names remain the same, of course, but almost everything else in the book was changed, from the full-color cover and four simple “please see” guidelines on each page to the complicated legends and instruction pages.

“For the first edition, to get it into the marketplace in a reasonable amount of time, we decided to take what we had and translate it and then allow that market to come back to us and say, ‘We really wish you would do this or that or something else,’ ” Welch explained.

“I still don’t know that we know it’s the best thing. But it will be a first step.”

If it succeeds, Welch says, he anticipates that the company might provide guides in other languages, such as Korean or Vietnamese.

The books, which will sell for $16.95, the same as the English versions, will be available at most locations that currently sell Thomas Guides as well as 800 to 1,000 new outlets in predominantly Latino neighborhoods. Each copy will include a buyer-response card to help the company tailor future guides to the needs of the community.

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Times staff writer Kevin Baxter can be reached via e-mail at Kevin.Baxter@latimes.com.