On Sun, Sep 16, 2018 at 12:21 PM, Joseph Eisenberg < joseph.eisenb...@gmail.com> wrote: [...]
I don't (yet) have an opinion either way on the feasibility or desirability of tagging languages used in a region. But this... It should be interpreted with the individual language name tags. > If the default language is zh;zh_pinyin (Chinese and romanized Chinese), > there should be a name:zh and name:zh_pinyin tag on each feature within the > boundary, in theory, and these two name tags should be combined in an > international map rendering. > > In theory, this should look similar to what we currently get with the > name=* tag > This is something I strongly disagree with. For most objects, name=* should not be translated because, for most objects it should be, in my opinion, an opaque representation of signage. If I don't speak the local language I need to know what to look for on the street sign or the shopfront sign as represented on the signage. Knowing what it would say if the locals had decided to put up signage in English is not very helpful. An IPA rendering of the local pronunciation of the name might be beneficial for those with text-to-speech. If a sign is bilingual then using name=xx: and name=yy: are perhaps of merit in breaking down the components of the full name. E.g., a sign near me says "Heol Napier / Napier Street" (the slash isn't actually present, the name is broken up into two lines) and so name="Heol Napier / Napier Street" + name:cy="Heol Napier" + name:en="Napier Street" is one possible way of representing it in a meaningful way. But how are you going to handle a house name like "Duncavin" which is about a mile from me? The "Dun" is Scottish for "fort." It's a house in Wales which is bilingual English/Welsh. And the name is a bad pun. Displaying the name phonetically might help somebody asking a local where the place is. Displaying a translation (even if the pun works in the other language) isn't useful. What's needed is what the sign actually displays, not what it would display if it were in a different language. Yes, knowing the language(s) spoken in a particular region might be useful. Yes, having the query tool display tag names like "shop" and "amenity" in the user's preferred language would be very useful. Rendering a house name like "Penrallt" or "Y Felin" in Cryrilic or Arabic or Hebrew script isn't really going to help anyone because house and street names are often labels whose meaning is opaque. Is 在米爾路上 (blame Google Translate, not me) really going to help somebody looking for a sign that has these literal characters on it: "Garnon's Mill Road"? Conversely, if I were in China and I were looking for a road signed "在米爾路上" would it help me to know it meant "Garnon's Mill Road"? -- Paul
_______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
