TLDR: if browsing a map for French wiki, and a city only has a Russian and Chinese name, which one should be shown? Should the city name have different rules from a store or a street name? ...
I have been hacking to add unlimited multilingual support to Wikipedia maps, and have language fallback question: given a list of arbitrary languages for each map feature, what is the best choice for a given language?
I know Mediawiki has language fallbacks, but they are very simple (e.g. for "ru", if "ru" is not there, try "en").
Some things to consider: * Unlike Wikipedia, where readers go for "meaning", in maps we mostly need "readability". * Alphabets: Latin alphabet is probably the most universally understood, followed by...? Per target language? * Politics: places like Crimea tend to have both Russian and Ukrainian names defined, but if drawing map in Ukrainian, and some feature has Russian and English names, but not Ukrainian, should it be shown with the Russian or Ukrainian name? * When viewing a map of China in English, should Chinese (local) name be shown together with the English name? Should it be shown for all types of features (city name, street name, name of the church, ...?)
Thanks!
2017-02-10 3:31 GMT+02:00 Yuri Astrakhan yuriastrakhan@gmail.com:
TLDR: if browsing a map for French wiki, and a city only has a Russian and Chinese name, which one should be shown? Should the city name have different rules from a store or a street name? ...
Where exactly are those names stored? OSM, Commons, the local Wiki? If in OSM, you should always have a fallback showing key:name, whatever it is, instead of name:fr.
Strainu
I have been hacking to add unlimited multilingual support to Wikipedia maps, and have language fallback question: given a list of arbitrary languages for each map feature, what is the best choice for a given language?
I know Mediawiki has language fallbacks, but they are very simple (e.g. for "ru", if "ru" is not there, try "en").
Some things to consider:
- Unlike Wikipedia, where readers go for "meaning", in maps we mostly need
"readability".
- Alphabets: Latin alphabet is probably the most universally understood,
followed by...? Per target language?
- Politics: places like Crimea tend to have both Russian and Ukrainian
names defined, but if drawing map in Ukrainian, and some feature has Russian and English names, but not Ukrainian, should it be shown with the Russian or Ukrainian name?
- When viewing a map of China in English, should Chinese (local) name be
shown together with the English name? Should it be shown for all types of features (city name, street name, name of the church, ...?)
Thanks! _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
Le 10/02/2017 à 02:31, Yuri Astrakhan a écrit :
TLDR: if browsing a map for French wiki, and a city only has a Russian and Chinese name, which one should be shown? Should the city name have different rules from a store or a street name? ...
Well, the third option might be to engage user to contribute with a localization. We might for that propose a specific guide, and advises from professional(/skilled) topographers would be a big plus here I guess.
Making automated transliteration suggestion from Russian to French is practicable, especially if "dummy" Cyrillic to roman script (plus possibly some nominative/adjectival suffix) is considered fine. Now if you want to go deeper and transpose the meaning of the toponym (which, surely most locales wouldn't know ever), it's challenge of an other scale.
Regarding transilteration from Chinese, expect if it comes with some romanization like pinyin, it seems to do any automatic suggestion (but call for contribution is always possible :).
I have been hacking to add unlimited multilingual support to Wikipedia maps, and have language fallback question: given a list of arbitrary languages for each map feature, what is the best choice for a given language?
I know Mediawiki has language fallbacks, but they are very simple (e.g. for "ru", if "ru" is not there, try "en").
Some things to consider:
- Unlike Wikipedia, where readers go for "meaning", in maps we mostly need
"readability".
- Alphabets: Latin alphabet is probably the most universally understood,
followed by...? Per target language?
I have no idea, but if you have sources on this topic, I would be interesting in feedback.
- Politics: places like Crimea tend to have both Russian and Ukrainian
names defined, but if drawing map in Ukrainian, and some feature has Russian and English names, but not Ukrainian, should it be shown with the Russian or Ukrainian name?
- When viewing a map of China in English, should Chinese (local) name be
shown together with the English name? Should it be shown for all types of features (city name, street name, name of the church, ...?)
Well, at least as an option, that might be interesting. More generally, you might like to have something like "Localized name (names used by natives)". The text between parentheses might indeed have several items. In the case of China, you probably at least would like to have the Ideogram and the pinyin as stated by the official government, plus – as far as I know – there are many languages used in China, so you'll probably have names which are more along local usage. Other cases which come to my mind are Amerindian traditional toponyms, and toponyms in France local languages (for exemple, /Strossburi/ and /Strossburch /for Strasbourg), as they are even on the municipality entrance.
Thanks! _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On Thu, Feb 9, 2017 at 8:31 PM, Yuri Astrakhan yuriastrakhan@gmail.com wrote:
I know Mediawiki has language fallbacks, but they are very simple (e.g. for "ru", if "ru" is not there, try "en").
Russian is a major world language, so there isn't really anywhere else to go. The fallbacks specified on the Localisation statistics page ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Localisation_statistics ) are useful for choosing which world language or supra-regional language to fall back to when you don't have info in a given language.
It doesn't address a lot of your harder questions of what to do when world languages collide, or when politics gets involved.
When viewing a map of China in English, should Chinese (local) name be
shown together with the English name? Should it be shown for all types of features (city name, street name, name of the church, ...?)
As a maps user, I'd like both the local name and the name in my language on any feature where that's possible (though not both if they are identical, as with "Paris"). The name in my language helps me navigate the map, and the local name helps me navigate the world with the map.
These are definitely some hard problems.
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