[OSM-talk] Revival: Multilingual Country-List

[Tom Taylor]

In fact, here in Ottawa, Canada, we do name= for the English and then 
name:fr= for the French version, for all streets. Across the river in 
Gatineau, Quebec, the practice is to do name=<a name in French> and not 
bother with the English. I have no idea if software trying to process 
our region is aware of the difference.

On 21/02/2013 7:01 AM, Hans Schmidt wrote:
> Am 21.02.2013 12:36, schrieb Peter Wendorff:
>> 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.
>>
> Why would you want to translate the street names? Do you want to
> translate Paris' “Avenue des Champs-Élysées” to “Allee der
> Champs-Élysées”? Nobody would know what it is anymore.
> Also, nobody wants to translate a “Lindenallee” in some minor german
> town to “Linden avenue”.  Also, automatic translation would be error prone.
>
>> 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.
>
> You say that there should be few defaults for mappers. But what you
> propose is exactly the opposite: You'd have a default, meaning that you
> would need to create a name:originallanguage even if there is a name
> present. I would bet that nobody does this. And if you don’t do it like
> that, chaos will occur if you decide to display the name.
>
> In contrast, if you do it based on region, it would simplify things much
> more:
>
> 1. You take the nodes/relation for Canada, add language=en.
> 2. You take the nodes/relation for Québec: language=fr
>
> Then everybody would just continue using name=British Columbia and
> name=Montréal, and no problem. The multilingual renderer would then
> show, in case the user wants to see French names, name=Montréal and
> name:fr=Colombie-Britannique. If the user is English, he would show
> name:en=Montreal and name:British Columbia.
>
> Tell me where this is not easier than adding a redundant name:en or
> name:fr for every town, bus stop and street in Canada. You would only
> have to change the multilangual renderer so that it would display it
> like that. This is no problem because I guess it is still in development
> – It could be done relatively easy (from a non-developer standpoint
> speaking).
>
> Plus, most of todays nodes only have a name=... tag, not a name:xyz=...
> one. You would not need to change anything.
>
>
>
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