[OSM-talk] Revival: Multilingual Country-List

[Peter Wendorff]

Am 21.02.2013 12:20, schrieb Hans Schmidt:
> Am 21.02.2013 11:43, schrieb moltonel 3x Combo:
>> So instead of saying that one "may delete the name:xx tag if it is
>> identical to the name tag" (to reduce bloat, presumably), the
>> multilingual-country-list should encourage to add the name:xx tag in
>> all cases.
>
> I would rather vote for a solution which compares the name tag 
> according to region. So, for Central African Republic the default 
> language is set to french, meaning that name is automatically also 
> becoming name:fr.
>
> Of course, you have some problems with multilingual countries, but 
> most of them have one strongly dominant language (China, USA), or the 
> languages are divided by region (Belgium, Switzerland). If there are 
> some few leftovers which do pose problem (where there is no clearly 
> defined language – e.g. Brussels), one can look for individual 
> solutions for them.
>
> If you recommend to add a redundant name:xx tag, most people will not 
> follow that advice. You would have to do that for every single road, 
> every single shop, every single bus stop. This is not practical. It is 
> much more practical to do it in the renderer.
Well... if there's no localized name tag, then you may omit the name:xx 
tag for that language, as there's no alternative.
On the other hand name:de might be useful even then, as it's possible to 
translate programmatically if the software knows about the language. The 
German suffixes -straße, -weg, -platz could be automatically transcoded 
to street, way and square, the afaik swedish -gatan is street again, väg 
is way and so on.
But if you try to translate something to another language this way where 
you don't know the source language, it's much more difficult.

So a recommendation might be to
- always tag name
- if you translate name into different languages, always add 
name:originalLanguageCode with the same content
- if you want, add that even if you don't translate it to different 
languages.

Yes, that's redundant - but it's easy to cut out for software (cut out 
every language attribute that equals the plain name), if wanted; and 
it's less error prone than a tag like "language=de" or like the lists of 
default language areas you propose above.
Sure: These list are helpful for all cases where only name is given, and 
that's a necessity for great software dealing with that, but that's the 
way defaults in OSM work: there should be a few defaults for mappers, 
where they should decide to not add a tag, but more defaults for data 
consumers, who could/should be able to have a best guess where data is 
missing.

regards
Peter