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Why are these countries not localised like the rest of the map? I thought it may be because English is an official language in India but it is also an official language in Pakistan and the map does not display it in English.

Is there a reason or is it planned for the future?

asked 24 Aug '18, 22:41

Karl1996's gravatar image

Karl1996
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accept rate: 0%

edited 24 Aug '18, 22:48


Disclaimer: I'm from Malaysia.

Some places in the country actually use "English" names e.g. luxury residential areas, shopping centres, bars and the likes (mostly private properties and spaces) -- in highly urbanised areas.

Other amenities and official government-related infrastructures will definitely use the national language; namely the Malay language. But some others, for example, Taoist temples; might be in Chinese only.

There's already a guide on the Wiki on name=*s, in the spirit of map what you really see.

Moving back to the topic. This is my personal opinion: probably something to do with the editor interface.

I've seen new editors, and their language locales (per their browser), are usually en-US or en-XX. So the iD editor will be displayed in English, definitely. This might somehow, indirectly, hinted them to translate almost everything to English (when it's not necessary at all!).

However, from what I've seen, the default localisation for OSes are in English; so any installed browser will be in English too. And there you have it: an almost Catch-22 situation.

P.S. I've tried my best to translate the iD editor to the local language as well. It's not 100% complete but I've only seen one people using it so far.

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answered 26 Aug '18, 05:14

AkuAnakTimur's gravatar image

AkuAnakTimur
1.1k91731
accept rate: 6%

edited 26 Aug '18, 05:25

The Indian OSM community has decided to use the English form in the primary name tag, with the name in other languages specified in other tags.

WikiProject India: Naming in different scripts and languages

The Standard map on the main openstreetmap.org site uses the name tag and therefore the name in English for these countries, but other maps can choose to use the other languages instead.

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answered 25 Aug '18, 00:01

alester's gravatar image

alester
6.6k266100
accept rate: 28%

This is the decision of local communities I guess.

I know only India case - there's special, localized map made for displaying in different languages of this big country, and English might be chosen as more neutral than any of 22 languages spoken there:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/PlaneMad/diary/38176

In general we have currently no solution for displaying any language in OSM, but there are maps available in any languages with Wikimedia style (light one):

https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/06/28/interactive-maps-now-in-your-language/

For example:

https://maps.wikimedia.org/?lang=zsm#6/3.722/-251.840

https://maps.wikimedia.org/?lang=ind#5/-4.149/-250.554

I hope one day OSM as a project will be able to render vector maps, which helps to change languages for example. It's not clear if this will be change in the current map style or something completely new, but it's something everybody wants, but no one is engineering right now...

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Top_Ten_Tasks#Localized_map_rendering

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/3201

https://github.com/openstreetmap/operations/issues/214#issuecomment-408816591

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answered 24 Aug '18, 23:55

kocio's gravatar image

kocio
2.1k12341
accept rate: 20%

edited 25 Aug '18, 00:05

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question asked: 24 Aug '18, 22:41

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last updated: 26 Aug '18, 05:25

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