Multilinguality

[pnorman]

Multilinguality is an important goal and we should support it.

The use cases I see for multi-lingual names are

• displaying a label in the user's language
• displaying a label in a language the user is more likely to understand than the local language (e.g. English is better than Chinese for someone who only understands Latin scripts)
• adding glosses (e.g. "Aachen (Aix-la-Chapelle)") to labels

It will be up to the tileset authors which languages they want to support. This will gracefully degrade because not supporting a language is the same as that language not being on an object.

We do not want to include all possible languages on every feature - for example, a tileset with English and German would include 会津若松市 as the name and Aizuwakamatsu as the English name with nothing as the German name, even though Germans would generally prefer the English name over the Japanese one.

[pnorman]

My preferred approach is to extend what we're doing with English and German to other languages. Have name_<code> attributes for each language on an object that the tileset supports.

[russss]

For what it's worth, this is also what's currently stopping me from switching to Shortbread for the OpenInfraMap basemap, as I select label languages based on browser language. (I could tweak the schema myself, but I haven't quite had the energy to do that yet.)

I think the tricky part is deciding which languages to support, because we probably don't want to include all of them...