[Talk-bd] Discussion: Issues with name localization for Bangladesh

[Frederik Ramm]

Hello everyone,

thank you for your participation in this discussion so far. It is an
important discussion to have.

I also realize that, by not using the Bengali language, this thread has
an automatic bias in favour of those who write English fluently, and
most participants here seem to have an academic background which further
skews the picture.

I will discuss this issue with a few more people and I encourage you to
keep thinking about it. Almost everyone who has argued in favour of
English has quoted international NGOs and aid agencies as a reason. I
wonder: Would these organisations be comfortable knowing that they are
responsible for suppressing the local language (and thereby, local
culture) in favour of English?

Another data point that you should consider is that almost every other
country with a non-latin script in the native language uses that
language in their name tags. To the un-trained western eye, the standard
OpenStreetMap rendering of China, Japan, Thailand, Iran, Korea, Myanmar,
or Sudan (to name just a few) is completely unreadable. This has not led
local OSM groups or YouthMappers in these countries to switch to English.

It is too early to make a judgement on this issue, and I would ask
everyone to carefully consider the arguments that have been raised, and
not rush to making large-scale edits on OSM.

There are a three issues on which I would like to speak with the DWG's
authority though:

1. Changeset comments and community discussion: It is totally ok for a
mapper in Bangladesh to use Bangla in a changeset comment. Don't ask
them to switch to English, this risks discouraging mappers from
participating altogether, or they might write lower-quality changeset
comments because they need to consult a dictionary all the time.

2. Translated name tags: It is never ok to translate a name. To give you
an example, a big lake in the South of Germany is called "Bodensee" in
German (literal translation to English: "Bottom Lake"), however the
English name for this lake is "Lake Constance". If someone doesn't know
these names then translating from English to German or vice versa will
give the wrong results. Only use name:xx if you actually *know* that the
thing has this name in the language "xx"; never translate. Some things
will simply just have a name in one language and not in another. That's
normal and you should not invent names. If the shop sign says "Fred's
Barber Shop" then that's the name of the shop for everybody. The shop is
not called "Fred's Herrenfriseur" in German just because that's the
translation of "barber shop".

3. Do not start edit wars. Even if you think you are right; try to
discuss the matter on other channels, on the mailing list, forums,
meetings. Find allies.

Finally, an advice we often give to communities who fight about the
"name" tag: The map on openstreetmap.org is not "the one and only map".
It is easy to set up a tile server that renders just the "name:bd" tag
or just the "name:en" tag or a combination of all of these; if any of
the involved groups have the server capacity for that, we're happy to
help with the setup.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"