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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
by jonathankoren 4y ago
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.
- bombcar 4y agoPersonal 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.
- roxymusic1973 4y ago> 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 https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabel_II_del_Reino_Unido
- koala_man 4y agoOr Cristoforo Colombo, aka Christopher Columbus
- int_19h 4y agoHistorically it's more common than not. E.g. most names of European monarchs are translated.
- philwelch 4y agoPopes 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.
- mjirv 4y agoI 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.
- kenneth 4y agoMy middle name is Olivier, by in English for a while I just translated it to Oliver.
- jonathankoren 4y agoI 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.
- bradwood 4y agoAnglicised spelling are probably often due to a change from a local alphabet to the one I'm using now.
- stingraycharles 4y agoCity 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”.
- Maxmo74 4y agoWell.. Tuscany, Apulia, Lombardy, Sicily, Sardinia, Piedmont. Where did you find that regions don't get translated?
- stingraycharles 4y agoMmm 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.
- Maxmo74 4y agoCosta 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 ;)
- stingraycharles 4y agoAnd Amsterdam, but TIL Rome is called Roma in Italian. :)
- 4y ago
- collegeburner 4y agome 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.
- kenneth 4y agoYou mean, in Español
- ninefathom 4y agoFootnote- 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- elurg 4y agoPlace 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.