On 05/08/14 00:37, Lester Caine wrote:
Simply writing a name in a different alphabet is something that the renderer can do if required.
There is rarely a 1:1 mapping between different alphabets, except within a single country, and the mapping depends on both source and destination languages - and in fact dialect. If you are going to do it mechanically, you must have detailed transliteration rules between every pair of languages that don't share a script. Just consider the different transliterations needed for Paris in French and Paris (Texas?) in English.
You could reduce the problem to O(n) rather than O(n**2) by having a phonetic transliteration, but note that, as normally used, IPA is an approximation, designed to distinguish phonemes within a single language, so you would need a more detailed IPA markup than most people are used to.
In this particular case, I think there is almost certainly an element of Ukrainian nationalism, attempting to expunge all traces of Russian. If you started transliterating based just on Russian pronunciation of Cyrillic, even if you called it a pseudo-language called Cyrillic, it would probably never be acceptable to the Ukrainians in the current political climate.
Especially with Chinese, there are large numbers of homophones with different meanings, and words are often composed from two characters. Approximate transliteration requires a lot of knowledge, to avoid unintended meanings in the transliteration. Also the script is used with widely different spoken languages, so a mechanical transliteration would have to choose one of those languages.
I'm not suggesting that it is a good idea to translate every street name, although I would note that that will already have been done, outside OSM, for all the central London (tourist area) streets, into Chinese.
I think place names are so fundamental to any geographical map that contains any text at all, that alternative names should be part of the core database (although one could have special structures for them.
Any mechanical process needs to be predicated on having phonetic transcriptions available (probably two: the one used in the place itself, and the one in the country's equivalent of received pronunciation).
English street names largely come from a small vocabulary, which strongly overlaps with place names. If you are afraid of a proliferation of ad hoc street name transliterations, maybe the map database should contain a list of names used for streets within a country. (In the USA, there is also a lot of re-use of place names (Roswell in New Mexico is not the only Roswell).
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