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Comment by jonathankoren | Hacker News Reader

Reminds me of Ivory Coast insisting that everyone call it Côte d'Ivoire, or even the "Republic of Côte d'Ivoire".

Sure, fine, whatever. Everyone deserves to be called by their preferred name. I find it weird though, because every country has a respectful exonym, so a direct translation doesn't seem wrong, and mixing languages seems even weirder.

I don't know why personal names don't typically get translated, but country names do, so this is not a hill worth dying on. It's just odd to me, especially since they are sticking with the colonial name instead of changing to some indigenous name.

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City names also get translated, but not regions / provinces. It’s all so arbitrary, probably mostly for historical reasons.

My own nationality (and perhaps yours, judging by your username?) comes to mind, Dutch, which doesn’t even vaguely resemble the way we refer to ourselves (“Nederlands”), but is close to a very old naming of a region in our country (“Diets”, ca. 1200 - 1550), how we call Germans (“Duits”), who call themselves different as well (“Deutsch”), where the word “German” probably stems from Germanic, which refers to a historical group of people in Central and Scandinavian Europe, comparable to “Latin”.

Just fyi., Dutch, Deutsch, Diets etc. are derived from Proto-Germanic *þiudiskaz (“of the people, popular”)[1]

[1]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/deutsch

Well.. Tuscany, Apulia, Lombardy, Sicily, Sardinia, Piedmont. Where did you find that regions don't get translated?

Mmm I had some French regions in mind, which typically don’t get translated in my own language at all (eg Côte d’Azure), but I just realized we do translate Pyrenées to “Pyreneeën” and there are probably many other examples as well.

We also translate Paris to Parijs, and Lille has an official translation to Rijsel but nobody uses that.

Sheesh if this were a codebase it would raise some serious questions about variable naming standards.

Costa azzurra in Italian, apparently.

Pretty sure we had several posts on HM related to the weirdness of translations for names.

But there are cities like Denver. Luckier than others, in that respect ;)

And Amsterdam, but TIL Rome is called Roma in Italian. :)

Finnish spells California as Kalifornia, translates e.g. North Dakota to Pohjois-Dakota, Hawaii is Havaiji, and so on. Regions do get translated too, but not as often.

It's a question of "how often do we need to mention this name"; only commonly mentioned get a translation or familiar-alphabet-munging.

Other countries needing to talk about provinces is more rare.

Personal names will sometimes be translated - depending on when the person moved or decided to present as.

I know of Indian colleagues who go by an English-sounding name that is at least somewhat close to their actual name. Others have anglicized a spelling that is phonetically close.

The main difference is that you can ask them what they prefer as they’re right there.

It’s harder to ask an entire country.

> Personal names will sometimes be translated - depending on when the person moved or decided to present as.

E.g. https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_II_del_Reino_Unido

Or Cristoforo Colombo, aka Christopher Columbus

Historically it's more common than not. E.g. most names of European monarchs are translated.

Popes too. Pope John Paul II was Jan Pawel II in his native Poland, Giovanni Paolo in Italy, and so forth. Pope Francis is Francesco in Italian and Francisco in his native Spanish.

If a Pope has one most proper name, it would have to be his name in Latin: Ioannes Paulus II, Benedictus XVI, Franciscus.

Certainly.

I was recently reading a Spanish newspaper that referred to Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Harry as Isabel and Enrique.

It was a little surprising since I’ve only ever seen the Spanish kings referred to as Juan Carlos and Felipe in English-language media, never by translations.

Anglicised spelling are probably often due to a change from a local alphabet to the one I'm using now.

My middle name is Olivier, by in English for a while I just translated it to Oliver.

I had a Chinese professor named “Da Ren”, but because his name was transliterated as “Daren”, he would just go as Daren for nonchinese, due to the collision.

Place names get translated when they become widely used in another language, this is because most "native" names often don't fit with the phonology of another language or the character set. It's particularly awkward for Turkey to insist on this name change because most languages don't actually have an "ü" letter so foreigners don't know how to pronounce it or type it on a computer.

Imagine if Bavarians insisted that everybody refer to their capital as "München".

Some people do translate their personal names. In china it's common for people to pick "english names" for interactions with foreigners in part because foreigners have huge problems pronouncing native names.

Footnote- there's a very practical reason that personal names are not typically translated: address, i.e. speaking to people or calling to them.

If you're attempting to call to somebody using a translated name, such a person might not recognize and respond to the name, unless they've had considerable time to adjust to it.

On the other hand, one is typically not walking around shouting a country's name to get its attention.

This is not a hard and fast rule, and the translation of personal names has a complex and somewhat sordid history, but there's your short answer.

On the other hand, the variance from countries to cities, provinces, etc... well... I have nothing to offer on that mystery.

me omw to go demand that people call us The United States of America in spanish instead of estados unidos

like if people really gonna apply this standard they better do it consistently.

You mean, in Español

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