[Talk-GB] City names translation

[Lester Caine]

On 05/08/14 12:23, SomeoneElse wrote:
>> I will be right saying that I can not know all cities, especially
>> small. I will search ukrainian web articles to see if there is
>> determined translation english-to-ukrainian for them.
> 
> That's rather more problematical.  Under what licence are those web
> articles published?  How do you know that the translation is accurate,
> and not a poor transliteration (like the Bury St Edmunds example)?  How
> does another mapper verify(1) that the name is correct?

This is perhaps my only question as well. The 'on the ground' guide line
provides one element of verifiability, and Welsh and Scottish names may
well appear on the ground, but since we can't easily verify what is only
present in third party material, some link to the source of this third
party information would be helpful? Which is why I would prefer to see
links to third party sources rather than simply cloning that data into
OSM ...

I rely on google to provide translations and I presume that the
Ukrainian translations provided by google are not 'politically correct'?
I'm having a battle with Facebook at the moment over Broadway,
Worcestershire since Facebook will not allow it, claiming it's in
Gloucestershire ... facts don't apparently have any place in Facebook.
This translates to Бродвей, Вустершир in both the Russian and Ukrainian
translation, and then a search for those names gives a substantial
number of hits. But many of those are in the alternate languages, just
as many countries use the 'French' name rather than the English one but
for Broadway that is one of the same ...

Rather than creating hundreds of 'translations' for every name in OSM,
all that is needed is to decide the fallback that you prefer when a
specifically different translation is not available. What I may be
missing here is if google is getting english-to-ukrainian wrong?

-- 
Lester Caine - G8HFL
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