<html><head></head><body>If the OSMF tile servers were to be used to provide webmaps for a vast audience, I would understand double labeling in English. <br>
That not the primary purpose, though. <br>
Yves <br><br><div class="gmail_quote">Le 24 septembre 2017 23:01:00 GMT+02:00, Matthijs Melissen <info@matthijsmelissen.nl> a écrit :<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
<pre class="k9mail">Hi all,<br /><br />I would like to ask for your opinion on the choice of language used in<br />the Default map on <a href="http://openstreetmap.org">openstreetmap.org</a>.<br /><br />This map (based on the openstreetmap-carto style) currently displays<br />all labels in their native language (as defined in the 'name' tag).<br />For example, we have a label 北京市 for Beijing, a label موريتانيا for<br />Mauritania, and a label Magyarország for Hungary.<br /><br />The openstreetmap-carto team quite frequently receives requests to<br />(additionally) display labels in English (or in any case the<br />Latin-alphabet). The people making these requests state that the map<br />is currently not very usable for an international audience, as many<br />people are not able to read labels in for example Arabic or Mandarin.<br />Some areas where this problem is particularly visible:<br /><a href="https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/803#issuecomment-330782700">https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/803#issuecomment-330782700</a><br />A prominent case of such a request is from the Gnome Maps team, who<br />decided not to use the Default style for this reason:<br /><a href="https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=764841#c35">https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=764841#c35</a><br /><br />From an ideologic viewpoint, I am very much in favour of not giving<br />preferential treatment to any particular language. Using the local<br />language seems fair in this respect. On the other hand, from a<br />pragmatic point of view I can also see that using English (in<br />addition) would significantly increase the usefulness of the map to<br />many people.<br /><br />I would be interested to know what others think about this. An option,<br />for example, would be to display countries names, and perhaps the<br />names of big cities, in English as well as in the local language.<br /><br />Note: making the map available in multiple language versions is<br />something we like to do in the future, however, this requires quite<br />significant technical changes. Therefore, this is out of scope for<br />now.<br /><br />More information on this issue can be found on Github:<br /><a href="https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/803">https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/803</a><br /><br />I'm looking forward to your opinions.<br /><br />Kind regards,<br />Matthijs Melissen<br /><br /><hr /><br />talk mailing list<br />talk@openstreetmap.org<br /><a href="https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk">https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk</a><br /></pre></blockquote></div></body></html>