[openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website] Copyedit English localization as American English (PR #5029)

Zeke Farwell notifications at github.com
Tue Jul 30 17:14:00 UTC 2024


> To be fair to @1ec5 he is following through on @gravitystorm saying that en should be US and the en-GB translation should be the British version.

Link to https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/4975#issuecomment-2222363119 where this was stated for convenience.

> That said I think this is pretty much unreviewable as it goes so far beyond simple spelling and there is so much here that I would take issue with that I doubt we could ever converge on an acceptable version in a reasonable time frame. 

Even though I'd be very happy to see many of these changes merged, I tend to agree that this PR should get split out into more manageable chunks.  Some of these changes would be very beneficial to new US mappers as they learn OSM tagging terminology.  When a particular term has a different meaning or is very rare in US English it can lead to misunderstandings and incorrect data entry.  Many of the other changes are more subjective, changing a word that is less common in US English to one that is more common.  I'd hate to see the consequential changes delayed or not happen at all due to disagreement over less important ones.

A consequential example:  The en_GB term "camp site" translates to en_US as "campground" and the en_GB term "camp pitch" translates to en_US as "campsite".  This would be very helpful to clarify in an en_US localization of the site!

A not so consequential example:  "waste basket" vs "trash can".  Trash can is probably the more common en-US term, but waste basket is also used.  There might be a slight semantic difference and "waste basket" might be a bit out of fashion, but I don't think picking one or the other would have much impact on a new mapper's understanding.

> I've learned many of the English terms by contributing to OSM. In fact, the key and value names have become the basis of the technical language we use to communicate among each other. ... osm.org is not a end-user site, it is for mappers. So I'd expect to find "mapping speech" where it exists.

I can relate to this.  I've learned many new terms through OSM that I wouldn't have otherwise in my native US English.  A common "mapping speech" (sometimes I call this the en_OSM dialect of English 😀) is certainly crucial for communication.  However, doesn't the fact that these terms are localized into many other languages already run a bit counter to this idea that mapping speech is expected on osm.org?  I could see an argument that the mapping speech term should be shown along side the localized term but that's not currently what happens when viewing the site in a language other than English.


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