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Comment by tty | Hacker News Reader

>Calling Trois-Rivières "Three Rivers" is as weird as calling San Fransisco "Saint Francis".

Is it really _as weird_ as calling SF Saint Francis? This link would suggest that the name "Three Rivers" exists at least in some capacity

http://www.cqsb.qc.ca/MyScriptorWeb/scripto.asp?resultat=253...

And the Wiki article says

>Traditionally, Trois-Rivières was referred to in English as Three Rivers

although it then goes on to say that this is becoming less and less common.

Edit: and a completely irrelevant but somewhat interesting piece of information, the city's inhabitants are called Trifluvians. I say interesting because the fluv- part obviously comes from the other French word for river, fleuve, rather than the one used in the actual name of the city, rivièr.

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See also "Ivory Coast" versus "Côte d'Ivoire" and plenty of other place names that exist in between localized and non-localized versions. Some people say "Ivory Coast" others say "Côte d'Ivoire" and others vary based on the week.

I'm not very familiar with the Quebec language laws, but I suspect that it's actually illegal to call it "Three Rivers" on signs or advertisements within Quebec.

It has nothing to do with being illegal. That's just not the name of the city. Why would someone call San Francisco St-Francis on any sign, since nobody would know what it refers to?

I concur. I'm from an english speaking area of new brunswick but we wouldn't know where the hell 3 rivers was if you called it that.

You mean, Neu-Braunschweig?

Which is a reference to a place in Germany/Deutschland/Allemagne/Niemcy/Saksa, right?

Teutonia!

Not illegal at all. We have plenty of towns with English names.

The language laws regarding signs state that french must either be the first and most prominent language on signs or the only language on signs.

This applies to text and common nouns. Not cities, trademarks or proper names.

Home Depot is still called Home Depot on Quebec signs. While some companies will put a French noun next to their English names, this isn't required.

As for a sign with Three Rivers, Trois-Rivières is a proper name, you don't usually translate those just like we don't translate people's name.

We sorta-kinda translate or mangle some names, don't we? I've often wondered why the English name for "München" is "Munich"... it's not even that close and doesn't mean anything in English.

It's far closer than Sverige -> Sweden, though. To us it may seem there's little rhyme or reason, but there is probably some logic behind it. :)

I hate to be that guy, but you're thinking about endonyms and eponyms.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exonym_and_endonym:

The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names defines:

Endonym: Name of a geographical feature in an official or well-established language occurring in that area where the feature is located.

Exonym: Name used in a specific language for a geographical feature situated outside the area where that language is spoken, and differing in its form from the name used in an official or well-established language of that area where the geographical feature is located.[2]

For example, China, India and Germany are the English exonyms corresponding to the endonyms Zhongguo, Bharat and Deutschland, respectively.

There's no need to hate being the guy who introduced me to the proper terminology. I like knowing the proper terminology.

> I've often wondered why the English name for "München" is "Munich"... it's not even that close and doesn't mean anything in English.

"Its native name, München, is derived from the Old High German Munichen, meaning 'by the monks' place'." [0]

Relatedly, it's "Monaco" in Italian, so Monaco the principality is "Montecarlo."

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munich

Historically us Brits were not very good at foreign names, Leghorn vs Livorno for example. In some cases though the name has changed and we use one not in current use, eg Danzig vs Gdansk. Spelling was less standardised too.

I actually remember hearing an official from Cote d'Ivoire insisting that we should use "Cote d'Ivoire" in all languages.

People localizing their country name creates confusion, typically a citizen from Cote d'Ivoire unable to explain to an airport official where he's from because the official only knows the locally translated name.

It gets very complicated pretty quickly. You are aware that the way you pronounce "Russia" sounds completely different from the way Russians call their country, right? In fact English does not even have the proper sounds to replicate that (rolling "r" and palatalized "s" for starters).

Oh, and of course, there's no one Chinese spoken word for China. That's because there's no one Chinese spoken language, but lots.

We have this in Brazilian Portuguese for some cities too. For example, saying "San Francisco" instead of "São Francisco" is fine (maybe because they sound similar?), but saying "New York" instead of "Nova Iorque" can be considered pompous in some circles.

It's fairly common for names of places, especially places of great historical importance, or areas where multiple cultures have traditionally overlapped, to have variant names in different languages.

There's nothing really odd or strange about this, and Trois-Rivières/Three Rivers is a trivial example, in which the translation is directly obvious. There are plenty of other examples that are a bit more confusing, especially where German place names are concerned; see Bratislava/Pressburg or Aix-la-Chappelle/Aachen.

Calling San Francisco "St. Francis" is strange because "San Francisco" has become the standard English name of that city, which doesn't seem to be the case for Trois-Rivières/Three Rivers - the very fact that no one ever says "St. Francis" but the author of this blog did use "Three Rivers" is evidence of this.

The number of people who would call that city Three Rivers is probably as big as the number of people who still refer to St James street in Montreal, that is, very small and dwindling.

It's probably much more likely that google translate did a literal translation of the city's name.

>It's probably much more likely that google translate did a literal translation of the city's name.

Running the article through GT shows that GT doesn't translate the name of the city. It keeps it in its original French form, both as an isolated word (just running Trois-Rivières through the translator) as well as part of the whole article.

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