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

Peter Wendorff wendorff at uni-paderborn.de
Mon Apr 16 09:18:24 BST 2012


Am 16.04.2012 09:54, schrieb Maarten Deen:
> Wouldn't it be an idea to tag the name in the characterset of the 
> country and have the renderer decide whether or not to render a 
> name:en tag with the name tag? 
I don't think it's a simple task to decide from the unicode 
representation of osm tags about the character set of the country, as 
it's not "encoded" in that way.
name:en might additionally not be what we want internationally.
Let's take Beijing as an example:
- it's something in chinese glyphs as a local name (and I'm not sure, if 
there aren't several variants even in chinese
- in Germany it's called "Peking", which originates in south china 
(according to wikipedia)
- Gaeilge language uses Béising
- Italians use Pechino

In this case English seems to use the "right" transcription "Beijing", 
but I'm sure there are other cases, where English (or at least British 
English) uses a more "customized" version, e.g. from colonialism.
> I don't know if the renderingrules allow such a decision to make. 
> After all, the renderingrules decide how the map looks like, and I can 
> understand if countries that do not use latin script want to render a 
> "latin-clean" map.
> And: do not tag for the renderer. Entering names twice is tagging for 
> the renderer.
+10

regards
Peter



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