[Talk-ko] What is 'English' anyways?

[Thierry Bézecourt]

Le 21/10/2015 17:10, Max a écrit :
>
> I have some objections towards the use of the name:en=English
> something like "Jugye-ro 7-gil". It is not English, and I think any
> Englishman would agree with that. "Jugye-ro 7-gil" is and stays Korean,
> it the words are simply romanized with arabic numbers. So personally I
> often don't even use this field any more if the name is not containing
> any numbers and thus would be identical to the name:ko_rm field.

OSM has probably no appropriate tag, but name:en is not worse than 
others. You might prefer "int_name", but it is not perfect either 
("international" includes non-Latin scripts).

Or maybe we should use name:ko-Latn, which seems to be more standard 
than name:ko_rm (according to 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names#Localization).
Indeed, these names are not exactly romanized names since they use 
numbers and punctuation (the romanized version of 양화로 is Yanghwaro, 
but the Latin name is Yanghwa-ro). And sometimes they include purely 
English words (WorldCup-ro). On the whole, these names are Latin script 
names.

(What should be avoided is what I have often seen in Seoul: romanized 
names built up by the mapper (who often makes mistakes because 
romanization is not an easy task). Transliteration should be done by a 
software, or not at all: 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names#Avoid_transliteration )

> However, we translate Naegori and gyo to Intersection and Bridge then it
> becomes English indeed and rightfully demands the name:en tag. So why
> not translating Gil and Ro while we are at it? I think it would be more
> consistent and logical.

I don't think you should do any translation, unless you can see the 
translated name in the street. "Map what's on the ground" and "Don't use 
name tag to describe things". It's useless to repeat in the "name" field 
what is already said in specific tags (bridge=yes, 
highway=secondary...). Therefore "name:*" tags should contain official 
names (Hangeul and Latin scripts, plus sometimes in Chinese and Japanese 
also) and nothing else.

Thierry