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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