[OSM-talk] Transcription and "internationalization" in place names

[Shu Higashi]

Hi Claudius,

We discussed on this topic several months ago in Japasnese community.
A community menber claimed not to add Romanized Japanes with blackets
just as you said.
But, our conclusion is to keep on adding Romanized Japanes with
brackets as bellow:
name=馬橋 (Mabashi)

The main reason why we decided to keep adding Romanized Japanes is
beacause most OSM viewer applications do not have the function to
switch languages.
So, we think it is better mainly for foreigners who visited Japan and
wanted to use OSM in Japan.

IMHO, It's also a matter of phonetics.
One need to pronounce a place name when he wanted to ask other people
how to go there.
Romanized Japanese is not a foreign language but a pronunciation of
the place name using latin characters.
It's also useful for us Japanese because we have several
pronunciations per one character.

For example, the character "馬" have 4 pronunciations ma, me, ba, and uma.
So sometimes we cannot pronounce a place name correctly without
phonetic expressions.

Shu Higashi


2012/4/16, Joseph Reeves <iknowjoseph at gmail.com>:
> Hi Claudius, list,
>
> Thanks for bringing this up as it is by far my favourite OSM issue; there
> can't be many examples of such widespread bad mapping practices. I've done
> remote mapping in the Middle East and North Africa which is the background
> I use to base my opinions on. I'm not aware of the issues in the Far East,
> but I imagine that there are a number of similarities with examples from
> the Arabic world.
>
> Thanks also for pointing out the example of open.mapquest.org - that looks
> like a really good way of handling this. I've previously said that more
> localised maps would help, but presumably they'd consume much more
> resources than simply tweaking the osm.org home page. Perhaps a bug
> reported should be submitted requesting that all names are rendered as the
> contents of name= whilst followed by name:en= (or int_name=) in brackets
> when different.
>
> Cheers, Joseph
>
>
>
> On 15 April 2012 16:47, Claudius <claudius.h at gmx.de> wrote:
>
>> I'd like to bring this topic on the table once more as I've recently
>> worked on that in the middle east area.
>> The challenge is that there are some mappers that add the English name to
>> place names so that they (and other international visitors) can read the
>> map at www.openstreetmap.org better. Most of the time this derives from
>> the misconception that with OpenStreetMap you are editing a map, while in
>> fact we are editing a database of geographic features and maps are just
>> one
>> representation of the data.
>>
>> The rule about place names the majority of OSM participants have agreed on
>> is "Use the name that is being used on the ground". Adding English as an
>> easy to get latinized transliteraion is most of the time not following
>> this
>> rule.
>> Usually the best way to convince those users that it's unnecessary work
>> and actually degrading the data quality is by simply pointing them towards
>> a different map representation of the same data. MapQuest did a great job
>> of showing an "English map view" (showing name:en as place name) while
>> preserving local names (shown in brackets): http://open.mapquest.com/
>>
>> I'd like to use my mail to raise awareness of this topic:
>> Please talk to you fellow mappers if you see them adding English names in
>> an act of goodwill to help other visitors of www.openstreetmap.org
>>
>> I'd also like to get some feedback especially from east asian countries
>> (especially looking towards the japanese and korean communities here) if
>> they want to revise their naming strategy/guideline to only have the local
>> name in the name-tag and the transliteration in name:en
>>
>> Also in Algeria, Libya and some other countries of the Maghreb the double
>> name tagging has recently gained momentum, probably due to some remote
>> mappers that cannot read arabic script and wanted to be able to read the
>> map. Still the primary langauge in all those countries remains Arabic
>> written in the arabic script.
>>
>> I'm also aware that there are several examples where there are multiple
>> primary languages in the same region: Belgium, Chad, Cameroon, etc. - Of
>> course for these areas multilangual/multi script naming in the name-tag is
>> applicable.
>>
>> Claudius
>>
>>
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>