[Talk-ca] Canadian_best_practices: bilingual

[Richard Weait]

On Thu, May 13, 2010 at 8:46 AM, Adam Glauser <adamglauser at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 12/05/2010 10:13 PM, Richard Weait wrote:
>> Are there bilingual road signs in Ottawa?
>
> Yes.  For example:
>
> http://bit.ly/9Y8JDn *
>
> This can lead to humourous situations when anglos like myself are
> absentminded.  Shortly after moving to Ottawa, when driving around
> looking for a particular address, someone was heard to remark "I think
> we just passed Rue Street".

Excellent, Adam.

I'm reminded of a person, newly arrived in bilingual Canada, and
instructed to buy some "Soda, anything but grape."  You guessed it.
An entire case of "Raisin" soda and an unhappy partner.

Here is a link to the map.  As I mentioned earlier it has known
drawbacks.  Where no name:fr exists I did not fall back to name, so
many objects are blank.  However, we do get a nice look at many
countries and major cities with their names en français.   Please,
let's keep this link just between us on talk-ca.  No reason to shout
it to the world until we've improved it, eh?

I'll improve this map this week.  I'll add a layer with fallback-name
and perhaps some other goodies.

http://weait.com:8080/map/

Additional known issues:
- this site is slow (rate-limited)
- this site will fall over without warning

Now that we can see name:fr, and our provinces look pretty good, would
anybody like to add name:fr for the states of our neighbour to the
south?