[OSM-talk] How to Translate Strings in OSM to other languages

[Julien Lepiller]

Le Fri, 31 May 2019 20:37:47 +0200 (CEST),
Mateusz Konieczny <matkoniecz at tutanota.com> a écrit :

> 31 May 2019, 19:47 by tshrinivasan at gmail.com:
> 
> > For translation, I got few contributors, who can translation if give
> > the exact content in a excel sheet or in some translation system.
> > They are not willing to explore osm, jsom, overpass query etc for
> > translating the strings.
> >  
> note: what I propose below is not existing at this moment, though
> maybe it would be a good idea to create something like this
> 
> What about an Android application that displays map, with markers for 
> locations where name in one of local languages is missing?
> 
> And user can fill such missing names, based on ground survey as one
> walks across town/village/neighbourhood?
> 

That sounds like something that Street Complete could do, don't you
think? But it will probably add a very dense set of quests, and most of
these questions will be very difficult to answer from the ground.

I can only talk about my experience in Brittany (France) where some
street signs are bilingual. If I had a quest on Street Complete for
that, I would almost certainly hide it, because maybe half of the
streets do not have a bilingual sign, so the question is impossible to
answer. Apart from roads and towns, POIs in my experience only have one
name, and it doesn't make sense to translate it, since people won't
recognize the name at all. For instance I don't think it makes sense to
add a name:en to a bar called "le bar bleu" even though it could be
`name:en=the blue bar`. Nobody would understand or use that name.

Since Tamil uses a different script from English, it might make sense
to use transliteration to show a map in the Tamil script, in which
case it's up to the map renderer to do a proper transliteration. It
might also be the case that the POI was named using a transliteration
(from a tourist who can't read Tamil for instance), in which case
renaming the POI to use the Tamil script makes sense I think. I believe
this has already been discussed for Japanese?