[OSM-talk] i18n-rich areas on the map

[Ed Avis]

Emilie Laffray <emilie.laffray <at> gmail.com> writes:

>>For example the Imperial Palace in Tokyo would have
>>
>>    name:en=Imperial Palace
>>    name:jp <at> Romaji=koukyo
>>    name:jp=??

>However, I do believe that translitteration
>is worthy of appearing in name:en when none exists.

I agree that when no real English translation exists, then the Romaji
version of the Japanese name should be shown instead to English-speaking
users.  However that's something the map renderer should do; the program
which makes the displayed map should know to fall back on name:jp at Romaji
if there is no name:en available.

There's no need to tag it as English just to make it be displayed to
English-speaking users; tag it correctly and let the renderer do the
right thing.

>Yes putting it in a different alphabet is not the same, but it can be a
>starting point until someone is filling the blank with a proper
>translation hence the two steps: translitteration and a dedicated
>translation website.

Yes.  Which is why putting Japanese text (even if it is in the Latin alphabet)
into name:en is not a good idea, because it makes it harder to see which things
really do need a name:en translation added.

>I am to some extent a bit annoyed to see things like name = name in
>native language (English translation) in the OSM files.

Agreed.  Once multilingual map rendering becomes common, we can expect to
see these cleaned up pretty quickly.

-- 
Ed Avis <eda at waniasset.com>