You understand correctly. And yes, you can guess a users language from
either http headers or geolocation or even a cookie. But the issue
there currently is, is that there is one Mapnik map with the captions
rendered in the tiles. To do something about that you would need to
make a different caption layer and present the one you think is right
for the user viewing the map as an overlay over a non-captioned Mapnik
map.
Or you have to make different Mapnik styles for different languages
and present them also based on those criterea.
Or, as I suggested before: make your own map. The german community has
one with a different style and lots of placed rendered in German and
English.
A problem with that is that it takes much more time and storage to
make those tiles.
I know google does something like it but does it IMHO in a bad way
because for me it translates every place into a Dutch name, giving
rise to oddities as Ariën-aan-de-Leie. So if you want to go that way,
expect it to be less than trivial.
I understand the issue. It’s frustrating because it is a technical issue
of the renderer, not of the database: it seems to conflict with the
“semantic first, not renderring” OSM principle.
The problem arises out of one of the general OSM principles: use the
name that is verifiable on the ground. This does not work well for
oceans or any international body. No ocean has a sign affixed to it
with its name (well, there might be signposts in different countries
pointing to it).
This is a great point. To me, it seems to point to removing the
“name” tag on such places: this information doesn’t correspond
to anything “real” (but the “name:en” does). And I don’t
even mind if some careless renderers just use “name:en” as a
default is the tag “name” is absent: it’s something that should
be parametric, but a renderer might just have be designed specifically
for English, so whatever.
And I would be violently against removing name tags for such places.
Oleksiy Muzalyev makes a great point why you should not remove name
tags from places. It makes them unfindable. You can not find something
which is not in the OSM database. Having them rendered in an unwanted
language seems to me to be much more desirable than not being able to
find them at all.
I’m sorry, I failed to find Oleksiy Muzalyev’s message: what was the
sent time of this message?
I’m very surprised by this comment, because OSM search also includes the
localised names in its search. Here is a random example:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=中国 and
https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Ĉinio both find China (
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/270056 ) as unique result. This
means that the base search in https://www.openstreetmap.org not also
searches for the “name” tag, but also for the “name:zh”, “name:eo”, etc.
tags (it also looks for the “official_name” tags too:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=中华人民共和国 ). Or are you
referring to another search engine?
Maybe you misunderstood me: when I say “removing the “name” tag”, I mean
removing the only tag whose name is strictly “name”. In particular, I’m
of course not suggesting to also the “name:en”, “name:eo”, etc. tags.
This would of course be silly as it would remove the information from
OSM: it’s not what I’m advocating here. I’m just suggesting to remove
the “name” tag, not its localised versions. This does not remove any
information as the “name” tag is usually identical to one of its
localised version: in the case of
https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/270056 , the “name” and “name:zh”
are identical.
Regards,
Martin.
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