5 ms·

Are there names that cannot be transliterated? Somehow all the banks and passport issuing governments in the world seem to manage this, if it's good enough for

by FDSGSG 5y ago

Are there names that cannot be transliterated? Somehow all the banks and passport issuing governments in the world seem to manage this, if it's good enough for the banks and tax authorities it's probably be good enough for the FSF. Every single passport has a transliterated version of the holders name in the MRZ.

ben_w 5y ago
Cannot? Yes, loads. English isn’t the entire phonetic alphabet. But more than that, why should they be transliterated? Unicode exists and is well supported, not using someone’s actual name when it’s entirely feasible is just rude. Edit: Fun example: “Yahweh” and “Jehova” are both transliterations of «יהוה»
- FDSGSG 5y ago
  > Unicode exists and is well supported, not using someone’s actual name when it’s entirely feasible is just rude. It's really not, and I say this as someone whose "actual name" has to be transliterated for an ASCII representation. It hardly ever makes sense to put in the work to convert old systems to accept unicode names, nobody actually cares. Every single government transliterates their citizens names on their passports.
mikl 5y ago
I think you will find that non-U.S. banks don’t use ASCII for this exact reason. A transliteration is arguably not someone’s legal name, and furthermore it’s kinda rude to demand that we mangle our names to fit someone’s 1970s technology system.
- FDSGSG 5y ago
  Practically all CRS tax information sharing happens using ASCII-7
  - mikl 5y ago
    Yes, since that’s basically been dictated by the U.S. Government. That does not mean the banks over here are using ASCII. Very systems generally use whatever national encoding was used before Unicode (ISO-8859-1 aka Latin 1 in my case) and more modern systems just use UTF-8. Trust me, I have non-ASCII characters in both my surname and my address. The only times I have to transliterate them are if travelling, shipping or banking internationally.
omaranto 5y ago
All names can be transliterated if you can agree on the transliteration system with the FSF. :P Even if you stick to just "standard" transliteration probably most names can be transliterated. The problem is that the transliteration is unlikely to be the person's legal name! In my case it wouldn't be. My legal name has an "í". I wrote to the FSF with an "i" to satisfy the ASCII requirement, but the thing with an "i" is not my legal name. I doubt in my case there will any trouble, but I thought it was funny the very first instruction in the copyright assignment process was literally impossible to carry out.
- FDSGSG 5y ago
  I bet your passport has a transliterated version of your name on it. In fact, you'll have a really hard time finding anyone who does not.
  - omaranto 5y ago
    I do happen to have a passport and it does have a version of my name in only ASCII characters, in all caps. I'm not sure whether what is on my passport is "my full legal name" or not. Indeed I do not know if that term has a precise definition. I can tell you my name is written slightly differently on my birth certificate. I didn't use the passport version of my name for this FSF email because it felt weird to use all caps. Instead I just changed the non-ASCII "í" to an "i".
  - omaranto 5y ago
    > In fact, you'll have a really hard time finding anyone who does not. This part is a little false. It's actually pretty easy to find people without a transliterated version of the their name on a passport, because it's pretty easy to find people without a passport! But I agree that passports usually have a transliterated version of the name, at least every single passport I've ever seen for someone with a non-ASCII name does have a transliteration.
dharmab 5y ago
Many organizations handle this very poorly. US immigration and customs forms do not have sufficient space or characters for many common Hispanic names. Famously, people with the last name Null are often at the mercy of SQL database input validation. I'm having trouble finding the article (haha) but there's a person named either A or Aa (a not-uncommon Southeast Asian name) who has problems with flight ticketing systems that use that string as a special code. There are multiple competing romanizations of most Asian languages (Mumbai vs Bombay, Peking vs Bejing, Sato vs Satou) which can result in mismatched name records. Recommended reading: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... The most inclusive format is a text field that accepts arbitrary length unicode strings. At the same time, you probably don't want people to put their names in as the Eggplant Emoji or USA flag. It's not a trivial problem.
- FDSGSG 5y ago
  > It's not a trivial problem. It seems pretty trivial. You just follow existing international standards and use the transliterated version of the name found on the passports MRZ if accepting unicode strings isn't easy for your particular use case.
  - dharmab 5y ago
    What if there are multiple standards? (Hint: there are.) What if the passport has the same issue as US immigration and doesn't actually fit the name? What about LGBT users whose passports may or may not reflect their names, depending on varying government policy? What about people who have never had a passport? (Common in the US, as well as displaced/vulnerable persons worldwide) These are not hypothetical edge cases, these are millions of real people. My own name doesn't fit in a lot of older forms and gets incorrectly parsed a surprising amount.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  > US immigration and customs forms do not have sufficient space or characters for many common Hispanic names. Also the other way around. I can't officially order from IKEA here in Spain because their online order entry demands a second surname (segundo apellido) which I don't have :D This is a typical Spanish thing. I do however have a middle name which tends to trip them up a lot (my middle name is more recognisable as a first name so it often confuses them) I just put '-' or 'NA' or something but technically the delivery guys could make issues about it considering that is not on my passport. However the rules are not taken very strictly in Spain which is one of the nice things about living here.

by FDSGSG 5y ago

ben_w 5y ago

Cannot? Yes, loads. English isn’t the entire phonetic alphabet. But more than that, why should they be transliterated? Unicode exists and is well supported, not using someone’s actual name when it’s entirely feasible is just rude. Edit: Fun example: “Yahweh” and “Jehova” are both transliterations of «יהוה»

FDSGSG 5y ago
> Unicode exists and is well supported, not using someone’s actual name when it’s entirely feasible is just rude. It's really not, and I say this as someone whose "actual name" has to be transliterated for an ASCII representation. It hardly ever makes sense to put in the work to convert old systems to accept unicode names, nobody actually cares. Every single government transliterates their citizens names on their passports.

mikl 5y ago

I think you will find that non-U.S. banks don’t use ASCII for this exact reason. A transliteration is arguably not someone’s legal name, and furthermore it’s kinda rude to demand that we mangle our names to fit someone’s 1970s technology system.

FDSGSG 5y ago
Practically all CRS tax information sharing happens using ASCII-7
- mikl 5y ago
  Yes, since that’s basically been dictated by the U.S. Government. That does not mean the banks over here are using ASCII. Very systems generally use whatever national encoding was used before Unicode (ISO-8859-1 aka Latin 1 in my case) and more modern systems just use UTF-8. Trust me, I have non-ASCII characters in both my surname and my address. The only times I have to transliterate them are if travelling, shipping or banking internationally.

omaranto 5y ago

All names can be transliterated if you can agree on the transliteration system with the FSF. :P Even if you stick to just "standard" transliteration probably most names can be transliterated. The problem is that the transliteration is unlikely to be the person's legal name! In my case it wouldn't be. My legal name has an "í". I wrote to the FSF with an "i" to satisfy the ASCII requirement, but the thing with an "i" is not my legal name. I doubt in my case there will any trouble, but I thought it was funny the very first instruction in the copyright assignment process was literally impossible to carry out.

FDSGSG 5y ago
I bet your passport has a transliterated version of your name on it. In fact, you'll have a really hard time finding anyone who does not.
- omaranto 5y ago
  I do happen to have a passport and it does have a version of my name in only ASCII characters, in all caps. I'm not sure whether what is on my passport is "my full legal name" or not. Indeed I do not know if that term has a precise definition. I can tell you my name is written slightly differently on my birth certificate. I didn't use the passport version of my name for this FSF email because it felt weird to use all caps. Instead I just changed the non-ASCII "í" to an "i".
- omaranto 5y ago
  > In fact, you'll have a really hard time finding anyone who does not. This part is a little false. It's actually pretty easy to find people without a transliterated version of the their name on a passport, because it's pretty easy to find people without a passport! But I agree that passports usually have a transliterated version of the name, at least every single passport I've ever seen for someone with a non-ASCII name does have a transliteration.

dharmab 5y ago

Many organizations handle this very poorly. US immigration and customs forms do not have sufficient space or characters for many common Hispanic names. Famously, people with the last name Null are often at the mercy of SQL database input validation. I'm having trouble finding the article (haha) but there's a person named either A or Aa (a not-uncommon Southeast Asian name) who has problems with flight ticketing systems that use that string as a special code. There are multiple competing romanizations of most Asian languages (Mumbai vs Bombay, Peking vs Bejing, Sato vs Satou) which can result in mismatched name records. Recommended reading: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-believe-about-names/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/2010/06/17/falsehoods-programmers-... The most inclusive format is a text field that accepts arbitrary length unicode strings. At the same time, you probably don't want people to put their names in as the Eggplant Emoji or USA flag. It's not a trivial problem.

FDSGSG 5y ago
> It's not a trivial problem. It seems pretty trivial. You just follow existing international standards and use the transliterated version of the name found on the passports MRZ if accepting unicode strings isn't easy for your particular use case.
- dharmab 5y ago
  What if there are multiple standards? (Hint: there are.) What if the passport has the same issue as US immigration and doesn't actually fit the name? What about LGBT users whose passports may or may not reflect their names, depending on varying government policy? What about people who have never had a passport? (Common in the US, as well as displaced/vulnerable persons worldwide) These are not hypothetical edge cases, these are millions of real people. My own name doesn't fit in a lot of older forms and gets incorrectly parsed a surprising amount.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
> US immigration and customs forms do not have sufficient space or characters for many common Hispanic names. Also the other way around. I can't officially order from IKEA here in Spain because their online order entry demands a second surname (segundo apellido) which I don't have :D This is a typical Spanish thing. I do however have a middle name which tends to trip them up a lot (my middle name is more recognisable as a first name so it often confuses them) I just put '-' or 'NA' or something but technically the delivery guys could make issues about it considering that is not on my passport. However the rules are not taken very strictly in Spain which is one of the nice things about living here.