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Comment by snogglethorpe | Hacker News Reader

One thing I found neat about this was that (at least by default) it seems language-neutral: scrolling around the world, labels over the U.S. are in English, labels in Japan are in Japanese, Korea, in Korean, China, in simplified Chinese, etc. Not even any romanized (or otherwise translated/transliterated) labels in parentheses. Just the native presentation.

Granted that for practicality, you probably also want a mode that makes the labels more useful for a reader that may not understand every writing system, but as a default (when the user doesn't express a language preference), there's something very satisfying about this method of presentation...

In my mind it reflects Wikipedia's aspirations of being a useful tool for the whole world....

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This is probably not intentional - the data is from OpenStreetMap, and if you have a look at http://www.openstreetmap.org/ you'll see that there isn't an attempt to make all labels the same language.

OSM has a policy that the base 'name' tag should be the name used on-the-ground locally, i.e. what appears in real life on street signs, building nameplates, and so on. Plus some special considerations for multilingual areas [1]. Items can also have additional language-specific tags (name:ja, name:en, etc.), which can in principle be used by renderers to display names in the language preference of the user, e.g. to produce an all-German-label or all-English-label map, to the extent the data is present [2].

[1] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Multilingual_names

[2] http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Map_internationalization

I wasn't aware of that policy - thanks for noting it.

> but as a default (when the user doesn't express a language preference),

I understand your viewpoint, and think it's noble. But you might want to tweak your parenthetical comment. In practice, I and most others do express a default language preference, which is sent as part of the browser's HTTP request. In my case it's:

    Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5

which means it's ignoring my preference. And I'm fine with that. Language is a mess. Look at Switzerland, which is labeled with all four official languages, or the three languages of Belgium. Yet South Africa, which has 11 official languages (and 11 official names - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Official_names_of_South_Africa ) is labeled only in English.

Being the edge case of internet users with a different default language than what my geolocation would result in, I know how frustrating it is to expect one language, and get another one "tailored" to you in order to "improve" user experience.

However, in this specific case I agree with the parent commenter. While the preferred language should affect the UI so you can interact with the map, I feel like in this case translating the content right away could take away from the experience and is not necessarily what the language flag should mean. It shouldn't be more than a click away, though.

I'm in immigrant living in country where English is not the native language. :)

However, I think you've misinterpreted the OP's comment and my response.

The OP likes the choice of native language for geographical names in a given country. You and I agree. The OP parenthetically notes that the reason is because the user has not expressed a language preference. I pointed out that the browser/user-agent actually does give a preference, which the server ignores.

It is this parenthetical logic I disagree with, not the result.

Wikipedia comes in many languages, so ultimately they require the mapping system to display labels based on the language of the user.

This can be complicated - imagine a wiki page about Paris France, translated into 40 or so languages each with their own high performant, cached map served from the same system. Wikimedia maps will be beyond awesome in a few years!

This doesn't seem to be true consistently FWIW; in Thailand the city I looked at had the city name in Thai (แม่สอด) but the street names romanized. Some other city names are romanized as well.

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