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Comment by bogwog | Hacker News Reader

Slightly unrelated, but why does Open Street Map display location names using the native language of the country? Japan for example has the names displayed in Japanese, China in Chinese, Russia in Russian, etc.

That means the map is basically useless for anyone who isn’t fluent in every single language on the planet. Imagine you’re traveling in Japan and you’re looking for Kyoto. If you use OSM, you’re screwed unless you can read Japanese.

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The osm.org main site is primarily intended to be used by mappers, not end users. So for this purpose it makes sense to use local languages since most people doing the mapping will be locals.

Other renderings such as the maps with me app use the appropriate names for the users language if available.

The problem is that the local volunteers feeding the data into OSM don't necessarily speak your language. Google can afford to hire translators and/or use machine translation for the regions they cover. That same isn't true for a volunteer-driven organization like OSM.

To add to a sibling comment, Open Street Map isn't like the proprietary services at all.

It's an enormous volunteer database, OSM doesn't display anything, the client does, and there isn't a single sensible default for that data.

> useless for anyone who isn’t fluent in every single language on the planet

It's not about languages but about alphabets. Translating names doesn't make sense.

Aren't some toponyms different from language to language though? What English speakers know as "Japan" is "Nihon" in Japanese.

You could contribute translations

That's not the problem

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