I live in Thailand and I cannot get over the fact that romanization is (seemingly?) completely unstandardized. Even government signage uses different English spelling of Thai words.
The chart halfway down this blog post lays out some of the challenges once the hanyu pinyin standard was instituted in 2009:
https://frozengarlic.wordpress.com/on-romanization/
The author concludes with this observation:
So that’s why people in Taiwan can’t spell anything consistently and why all the English-language newspapers spell the same things differently. As for me, I’m giving up on trying to remember how everyone spells their name. I know lots of people, especially Taiwan nationalists, dislike having the PRC hanyu pinyin system. I dislike imposing it upon them. However, in only three weeks, I’ve found myself spelling the same thing in multiple ways and wasting time looking up how I did it last time. Since almost no one reads my blog anyway, I’ll do it the way that’s most convenient for me.
I’ll also always provide the Chinese characters so that people who can read them know who I’m talking about.
There’s a surprising amount of interesting articles on wikipedia about that.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ough_(orthography)#Spelling_re...
It's unfortunate but I don't think it'll get fixed any time soon. Nobody wants to be called Mr. I, O, U, An, or No. (The most common romanization for these family names would be: Lee, Oh, Woo, Ahn, and Roh.)
No country is going to force their big multinationals to change their international name they chose back in the 50s and are now known as world-wide. Personal names aren't too chaotic either, as the choice presented when choosing a romanization is limited, people can't just make stuff up on the ground. They're off, but generally in the same ways.
> Nobody wants to be called Mr. I, O, U, An, or No.
An is pretty common - given the massive reach of KPop among global youth, I wouldn't be surprised if the most well-known 안씨 as of 2025 was an "An" (a member of the group 아이브). Roh has fallen out of favor, young 노s generally go with Noh, the Rohs are usually older people. I too do long for the day where an 이 or 우 just goes with I or U, or if they must, at least Ih or Uh :)
IMO you left out the worst offender, Park. At least with 이 or 우 I can see why people would be hesitant to go the proper route, as most of the world is unfamiliar with single-phoneme names, but 박s have no excuse.
With 이, there's a pretty good alternative as well, and what's more - it's actually already in use when talking about the greatest Korean in history, Yi Sun-Shin! So much better than "Lee".
IIRC, the road signs for “Henri Dunant Road” were spelled differently on either end, which was ironic, because at least that did have a canonical Latin form.