[HOT] Name tag in non-latin script - hindrance for NGOs/aid agencies?

Pierre Béland pierzenh at yahoo.fr
Fri Nov 29 03:41:29 UTC 2019


Summary of Frederik Ramm presentation> the DWG has been involved in a discussion being had by the community in
a country where the official language uses non-latin characters.
> more than 98% of the population speak the official language as their native language
> Older people or people outside of the university system will often not be able to write English fluently.
> Signs (road signs, signposts) seem to be exclusively in the official
language 
> There is a dominant group in the country that says: Let us use English

This is a country where the great majority of the people (98%) speak the native language and where many are not fluent in english.  Sign post are it seem in native language except for the major roads.

Like for many african countries, their access to the digital world is often through phones. And surely applications could be adapted to let them access the information in their one language / alphabet including why not Maps.  Various experimentations of  Vector map layers that let switch from languages / alphabets show that it is possible to answer the needs of various communities.  And the humanitarian international community would be surely better served if it could know the local road names and not only an english translation. 

NGOs/aid agencies is to develop the country. I also suppose that this is a non permanent situation and that the best is to do it with empowering the Local community to develop their country.

If the first to OSM contributors were mostly educated, mostly communicating in english and adapting rules to favor english, they should now take time to favor more participation and discuss about this and see if some compromises can be adopted.  But importantly this should be done with respect. The first adopters should avoid imposing their view, but take time to listen to others.

As it has been said, it is possible to add both name, name:native and name:en.  From there it will later be easy to structure the info with the official name being :native or :en.
Below are some statistics I gathered from Nov.27 OSM extract for nodes having names. It shows that the great majoriy of names (79%) are only in english.  The major problem seems to assure that local names be offered in OSM.  

A big data collection effort to realize. And good challenges for our developpers.


Country OSM nodes statistics  that contain namesfrom Nov.27 Geofabrik extract
Name  :native   :en    Count-------------------------------
bn                            1,670
bn                    en     3,709
bn     native                   93
bn     native      en     1,901
en                           31,792
en                    en        185
en      native                 872en      native     en          59-------------------------------
Total                       40,281


Pierre 

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