Firstly, Note name of the thread, It's about transliterating names of "humans", not transliterating in general, so translation doesn't make sense at all in this case.
Secondly, I can transliterate names of Chinese people to Dutch or other Latin languages too, it will work well and it will have completely separate label in that item (so an item can easily have Dutch label and English label at the same time).
Thirdly ISO standard is something we can use in some cases but most of the time how common the transliteration is more important. By some standards Smith should be transliterated to "اسمیث" but "اسمیت" is more common and the latter is being used everywhere in Persian and the bot works that way. (Note that transliteration to Arabic is something completely different) (P.S. Arabic is another language I can work on it too)
Fourthly: Country of citizenship of the person is important too (My bot considers this too) why? e.g. "Michael" in Michael Jackson is being transliterated to "مایکل" (maay-kel) but "Michael" in Michael Schumacher is "میشائل" (mi-shaa-el) because this name pronounces differently in different languages. Same about James Bond and James Rodriguez (first is "جیمز", "Jeymez" and latter is "خامس", "Khaa-mes").
Best
On Thu, Apr 23, 2015 at 11:36 AM Erics wikiadres wikizaken@xs4all.nl wrote:
Thanks for your reaction, Stas. I understand what your saying, but I think it's quite arbitrary to use English transliteration. In my opinion transliteration should be unbiased and impartial, like those international (ISO) standards are. Wikidata provides a possibility to enter national standards Shchedrin (English), Sjtsjedrin (Dutch), Chtchedrin (French) and Schtschedrin (German) as aliases. So why not use the ISO-standard as the main form?
best regards, Eric.
Stas Malyshev schreef op 2015-04-22 22:10:
Hi!
maybe French and German too). Problem could be that these standardized forms lead to diacritic characters (e.g. hacek on 'c' & 's'; Чайковский ---> Čajkovskij and Щедрин ---> Ščedrin). Is wikidata able to deal with these?
As a native Russian speaker I can say transliteration like Ščedrin would look very unusual for Russian-speaking person (assuming they have experience at all with non-cyrillic transliterations, which most internet users do). Something like Shchedrin looks more familiar and seems to be much more common. While letters like ч and щ can indeed generate some long combinations which are not very visually appealing, I think it is more common than diacritics, which most people I think would struggle with.
As for Hebrew, there are standard transliteration rules, which look a bit weird since they are not phonetical but rather base on spelling and distinguish some letters that all but lost their phonetical distinction in modern Hebrew (such as kaf and kuf) - but they are frequently used for signs, street names, maps, etc. These rules have been recently updated but old ones still are used from time to time. See more athttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Hebrew
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