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I am pretty disappointed with our name handling also. I was helping an Iraqi move to the US, and someone translated his name as Hogar instead of Hoger on one do

I am pretty disappointed with our name handling also. I was helping an Iraqi move to the US, and someone translated his name as Hogar instead of Hoger on one document, and it cost him a few months. As far as he was concerned his name doesn't have any english letters in it, so Hogar and Hoger are just about the same.

IgorPartola 12y ago
To me the best solution really would be to issue documents with two fields: your name as an unbreakable set of characters in your mother tongue, and pronunciation of your name in Latin1. That way I could be: Игорь Партола / Igor Partola The trouble with this is when you have to spell your name over the phone. Nobody would figure that out. One day that won't be a problem. That'll probably be the same day that all manner of government computer systems stop using all caps.
darklajid 12y ago
Hah, anecdote time. Lived in Israel for a year, needed to fill forms (visa, bank account etc). My name is Benjamin, but the pronounciation is different from English (ja is different, in english it turns to a weird dj as in djungle). Talking english in Israel lead to the transcription of the _english_ pronounciation (they have a special way to encode just that sound as 'ג). So, I have a name that IS more or less hebrew, and exists in a mostly equivalent way in IL, but it was written in a wrong way. Anecdote 2: Since this dj sound doesn't really exist in Hebrew and needs to be encoded as (in latin letters) g', some programs don't understand that. Copy/pasting one Hebrew mail I got into Google translate lead to my name being translated as bang sex (name in latin latter would kinda look like bng'min, the ' was considered as a delimiter and so bng became bang, and the rest was taken as a separate word). I was confused, my coworkers amused. My last name was written differently on my cc, my healthcare documents and my apartment contract. Weird times.

IgorPartola 12y ago

To me the best solution really would be to issue documents with two fields: your name as an unbreakable set of characters in your mother tongue, and pronunciation of your name in Latin1. That way I could be: Игорь Партола / Igor Partola The trouble with this is when you have to spell your name over the phone. Nobody would figure that out. One day that won't be a problem. That'll probably be the same day that all manner of government computer systems stop using all caps.

darklajid 12y ago

Hah, anecdote time. Lived in Israel for a year, needed to fill forms (visa, bank account etc). My name is Benjamin, but the pronounciation is different from English (ja is different, in english it turns to a weird dj as in djungle). Talking english in Israel lead to the transcription of the _english_ pronounciation (they have a special way to encode just that sound as 'ג). So, I have a name that IS more or less hebrew, and exists in a mostly equivalent way in IL, but it was written in a wrong way. Anecdote 2: Since this dj sound doesn't really exist in Hebrew and needs to be encoded as (in latin letters) g', some programs don't understand that. Copy/pasting one Hebrew mail I got into Google translate lead to my name being translated as bang sex (name in latin latter would kinda look like bng'min, the ' was considered as a delimiter and so bng became bang, and the rest was taken as a separate word). I was confused, my coworkers amused. My last name was written differently on my cc, my healthcare documents and my apartment contract. Weird times.