[openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website] Missing American English localization (Issue #4975)

[Minh Nguyễn]

As far as I can tell, config/locales/en.yml is _de facto_ written in Commonwealth English, with Britishisms such as “centre”, “colour”, “licence”, and “shop” generally prevailing over Americanisms such as “center”, “color”, “license”, and “store”. There’s also an en-GB.yml for even more classically British turns of phrase, but no en-US.yml for even basic quirks of American English. A user who knows American English will most likely configure their browser and account to prefer the en-US locale code, but they’ll see Commonwealth English instead.

For the most part, this is no problem: “colour” and “licence” look quirky, maybe slightly erroneous to someone unfamiliar with the dialect. But this codebase also maintains translations for a number of feature tags that would be much less intuitive to an American English speaker.

Not a single American knows what these are, even though “license” is spelled the American way:

https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/63f0b9257d62818d435ef6510340b9681efe547b/config/locales/en.yml#L1275

You’d have to be an OpenHistoricalMap contributor like me to know what these are:

https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/63f0b9257d62818d435ef6510340b9681efe547b/config/locales/en.yml#L749

99.9 out of 100 Americans would tell you this is scientific laboratory. iD calls it a “drugstore”, which is apparently closer to the intended use of this tag:

https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/63f0b9257d62818d435ef6510340b9681efe547b/config/locales/en.yml#L1297

For sure, Americans know what these are, but `amenity=toilets` isn’t supposed to refer to a lavatory fixture specifically, and it’s a bit impolite:

https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/63f0b9257d62818d435ef6510340b9681efe547b/config/locales/en.yml#L2387

Americans mostly use “shop” and “store” interchangeably, and so does this repository:

https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/63f0b9257d62818d435ef6510340b9681efe547b/config/locales/en.yml#L1301-L1307 https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/blob/63f0b9257d62818d435ef6510340b9681efe547b/config/locales/en.yml#L1384-L1390

One way or another, we should provide more regionally appropriate terms to American English speakers, to reduce confusion about what these tags mean. I don’t have an opinion on whether we should split out a separate en-US.yml or have the Americanisms take over en.yml, since either way we’d be more likely to load the expected strings when the user says they prefer en-US in their account settings.

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