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

John Sturdy jcg.sturdy at gmail.com
Mon Apr 16 17:27:15 BST 2012


On Mon, Apr 16, 2012 at 4:58 PM, Janko Mihelić <janjko at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello, this is a great topic!
>
> There is one more issue with internalization and names. Users tend to add
> more than just names in "name=*" tags.
> For example "Lago di Garda". If a machine tried to turn that into English,
> it would be "Lake Lago di Garda", which is not right because lago already
> means lake. Fortunately, mappers put international tags, and the english one
> "name:en" says Lake Garda. But now, if a machine isn't carefull it could say
> "lake Lake Garda".
> Also it doesn't feel right to put "Lake" in front of all the lakes in the
> World. A machine should do that.
>
> Also lots of mappers put "School" in school names, "Airport" in airport
> names, "Bay" in bay names, and so on..
>
> My question is, should the renderer join "lake", "school" and "airport" with
> their names? I think that would make users put in cleaner data.

I think that words like "lake", "school" etc are part of the name, and
should be in the data, and the renderer should present the name just
as it is in the data.  I don't think a machine could get this right.
For example, not all named instances of "natural=water" are called
"lakes" in English (e.g. "Windermere" is a name in its own right, and
does not need "Lake" prepended to it).

__John



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