Global Multilingual Place Names > Rationale: Why separate placemark files?
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Place names (toponomy) are vital to navigation in Google Earth. With the introduction of Release 4, the application now permits users to see the world in a few languages, but only after exiting and restarting. The user cannot switch quickly to another language "on the fly."

The "system default" country and place names are a mixture of
  • Translations - Depending on the method and quality of the work, we can find the United Kingdom's place name Rockingham translated to mean this in other languages:

    Such literal translations are often called "calques."

  • Transliterations - these vary by the language of the reader. For example, for Bulgaria's capital, we have Sofiya (Azeri and Google Earth's "default"), Sofia (English, et al.), Sofija (Croatian, et al.), Sofja (Maltese), Sofya (Turkish), Szfia (Hungarian), and many others whose alphabets cannot be shown in this BBS.

  • National Languages - Wikipedia says India has 23 official languages. Which should be selected?

  • Native Languages - Wikipedia says India has 1,683 mother tongues, the Russian Federation has over 100. Which should be selected?

  • Alphabets - many users have little familiarity with the Western European alphabet (Latin I code set). Also, languages sometimes use more than one alphabet.
    ---- SerboCroatian uses Cyrillic for Serbian and Latin for Croatian and the Bosnian dialect.
    ---- Hindustani uses Arabic for Urdu and Devanegari for Hindi
Google Earth should
  • Eliminate the "system default" language, which is no language at all.

  • Permit users set the default place name language independently of the language in which the application will present dialogues, menus, etc.

  • Accept searches in any language and alphabet.

  • Switch between place name display languages rapidly (including countries), without an application restart.

  • Eliminate parentheses in placename displays.

  • Support non-Western European languages in this BBS uniformly across various browsers.


From Wikipedia: