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

[Minh Nguyễn]

> I know this is well-intentioned and addresses a genuine technical issue, but I'm a little sad about this. It's essentially squashing one of the appealing aspects of OpenStreetMap's individuality in favour of unintentionally reinforcing some low-level cultural imperialism - i.e. the notion that the lingua franca of open source software is always American English. Having the project default to British English was always one of the little markers of "OpenStreetMap is different", a bit like Ruby's social norms being essentially Japanese.

I completely understand. Personally, I like the occasional quirky Britishism, if it’s just a difference of spelling or diction. And I’m a _huge_ fan of the Oxford comma (sometimes odiously branded the Harvard comma). But there are many problematic tag translations that we should have some solution for. I’m here because, a few weeks ago, [we had an impromptu mapping campaign](https://en.osm.town/@watmildon/112764519783533761) around that most American of institutions, the drive-through liquor store, and a bunch of us saw “Off License” and thought it was a bug. Maybe a misplaced license agreement string?

I honestly have no problem with relegating the Americanisms to en-US.yml if we can ensure that works with our translation management system. The CLDR default content locales cause problems for other languages too, like [Portuguese](https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/utilizacao-de-etiqueta-name-pt-br/100139/10). But Translatewiki.net has taken a hard stance that they want to follow Standards. One workaround would be to maintain the American English localization manually outside of Translatewiki.net, but the maintainers would have to review updates manually too.

> Keeping the English version quite close to the OSM tag name has always been somewhat intentional.
> Quite a few of these classification terms are very technical. They are certainly not part of a standard English curriculum. Speaking for myself, 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. I can casually mention that I've been on a tracktype-grade-3 yesterday and everybody here will immediately understand. Using translations into another English dialect on the main osm.org website is bound to cause confusion for everybody who is used to the OSM terminology which just happens to be British English. osm.org is not a end-user site, it is for mappers. So I'd expect to find "mapping speech" where it exists.

If that’s what we want, then this diff will get even bigger. For better or worse, this localization already taking liberties with some strings to sound more British and less Mapper, such as `shop=alcohol` as “Off License”, `amenity=biergarten` as “Beer Garden”, and `highway=bus_guideway` as “Guided Bus Lane”. If anyone is depending on the search results to learn the raw tags, they’re going to be in for a surprise with `railway=halt` as “Train Stop” and `railway=switch` as “Railway Points” (which I changed to “Switch”).

Maybe we could add a tooltip to each row of the search results and map key that indicates the raw tag, just like when you hover over a linked element in the element inspector. That could have the educational effect you’re expecting – even if the user speaks Dutch.

<img width="376" alt="landuse=meadow" src="https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/bd8bb0f1-1368-4a7f-9432-ef2098a7c810">

> 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. What I'm not sure of is what a reviewable version would look like.

Yes, I really appreciate all of you taking the time to look at this draft so far, but I really didn’t intend this to be a final product to ram through. This maximalist changeset gives native speakers an opportunity to discuss individual changes line by line, and then we can figure out how to stage the changes in more digestible chunks for the maintainers to review. Many of the changes are inessential, as @zekefarwell points out: if we can’t identify any strong reason to change a string, we can leave it alone. We could decide that “shop” gives the site a more lighthearted feel compared to “store”, though a few “dealerships” and “parlors” might still be appropriate.

How about we start with some things that are clearly bugs, regardless of dialect, such as `man_made=dolphin` being mislabeled as “Mooring Post”? Then maybe some things like `tourism=camp_site` and `highway=unclassified` that currently hew to OSM English but are likely contributing to mistagging. To me, the -ours and -ises and single quotation marks are the lowest priority of all.

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