4 ms·

Realistically the government just needs to support Unicode which has been around since the early 90s.

incrudible 6y ago
A little bit of contracting work supporting legacy government computing infrastructure should quickly cure you of that delusion.
lebuffon 6y ago
Unicode lets you record the data but does not address the societal problem of record keeping in a way that all staff can use. British Columbia has a very large population of Chinese speakers. If you allow multiple language script for every language you would still need a transliteration in English or French, since they are the common denominator languages. Same is true to for Cyrillic, Arabic and Korean, all of which are well represented in modern day Canadian society. Some years back the City of Richmond BC was having difficulty in the fire department because they could not identify the names of some local businesses that called in because the signs were all in Chinese script. :) Not sure how that has been or was actually rectified.
- PowerBar 6y ago
  I think you've touched on two separate issues. The first is with human interactions with the businesses (firefighters finding the building), the second is dealing with official paperwork and interactions (filing for the license, etc). The former has various solutions depending on the situation (ex: numbered street addresses, logos, internationalized names, etc). The later, and one the article is dealing with, is mostly solved by the fact that all business licenses (at least in BC) have a unique "business number" assigned by the city in which you acquire your license. Other than the initial data entry of the name and it being displayed reasonably on forms, any need to identify the business during an interaction can fall back to the business number if the representative does not know how to pronounce, spell or type the name. In fact, I suspect most government employees just type the business number in anyway because it's fast, easy and doesn't involve trying to spell whatever post-modern spelling they used to get an available domain name.

A little bit of contracting work supporting legacy government computing infrastructure should quickly cure you of that delusion.

lebuffon 6y ago

Unicode lets you record the data but does not address the societal problem of record keeping in a way that all staff can use. British Columbia has a very large population of Chinese speakers. If you allow multiple language script for every language you would still need a transliteration in English or French, since they are the common denominator languages. Same is true to for Cyrillic, Arabic and Korean, all of which are well represented in modern day Canadian society. Some years back the City of Richmond BC was having difficulty in the fire department because they could not identify the names of some local businesses that called in because the signs were all in Chinese script. :) Not sure how that has been or was actually rectified.

PowerBar 6y ago
I think you've touched on two separate issues. The first is with human interactions with the businesses (firefighters finding the building), the second is dealing with official paperwork and interactions (filing for the license, etc). The former has various solutions depending on the situation (ex: numbered street addresses, logos, internationalized names, etc). The later, and one the article is dealing with, is mostly solved by the fact that all business licenses (at least in BC) have a unique "business number" assigned by the city in which you acquire your license. Other than the initial data entry of the name and it being displayed reasonably on forms, any need to identify the business during an interaction can fall back to the business number if the representative does not know how to pronounce, spell or type the name. In fact, I suspect most government employees just type the business number in anyway because it's fast, easy and doesn't involve trying to spell whatever post-modern spelling they used to get an available domain name.