street names in Israel have several fundamental problems

Maybe…

I just dont want a situation where somebody will claim that I prefered the Haim variation over the Hayim, but this is wrong.
As I understood in the last month there is no right and wrong in street name translation.

We just have to make it somehow a equal experience to search for street names in OSM for Israel.

Small update. As I included the tertiary streets the all over named street value is now around 30.000.

I have processed only around half of it (Aleph till Het).
It takes a lot of time to work over the streets.

Beside that I can see that our over all named street value is growing around 100 - 200 streets a month.
So every month there is more new gaps in the old data :slight_smile:

@Mr_Israel, each time you do extracts into google docs - please share them. Additional pair of eyes will never harm (in most cases :slight_smile: )

I can’t do that share every time. This is simply not possible time wise.
You can’t edit details and then wait some days before uploading. Meanwhile there could be changes on this data.

But what we can do is uploading a current view on the data as it is from 1 - 15.000

This could help find issues and discuss next steps.

As I continue working on the streets naming of Israel I discover more and more issues we have at the moment.

Example A:
Sometimes with ‘’ sometimes in Hebrew with only one ’
As we should have a standard way to define it we need declare how the standard should be.

ירושליים
ירושלים

Example B:
The Hebrew letter צ is translated in OSM every time fully different. I don’t want to remove any variation but we should use the same way for the “name:en” tag

צבי => Tsvi or Zvi or Tzvi

Example C:
Two Hebrew letters can be translated in several ways כ and ח makes the translation look very unconsistance.

לכיש Lachish or Lakhish or Lahish

Example D:
כרמל => Carmel or Karmel

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If you have an idea or you want to create a kind of guide you are very welcome.
I’m not that good in Hebrew to take over those questions.

I have gone through the rest of thousands of streets and finished the review of more than 33.000 streets.
So there should be a very very minimum amount of non translated streets left now.

Finally this is done.

Maybe we can take a look on the result and have some translation guidelines?

I hope it’s not too late to contribute to the topic.

The official rules for transliterating Hebrew names to Latin letters is published by the Hebrew Academy - האקדמיה ללשון עברית:
http://hebrew-academy.huji.ac.il/hahlatot/TheTranscription/Documents/ATAR1.pdf

The rules simply replace every consonant and vowel with one or two Latin letters.

There are additional rules for דגש חזק, the use of capital letters, אותיות השימוש, the use of an apostrophe ('), and the use of English translation for common words like Street, boulevard, Junction, interchange, and Port.

Note that these are transliteration rules, not translation rules. Nevertheless, the rules encourage the use of traditional foreign names, such as Mt. Zion (rather than Mt. Tziyon) and Herzl St.(rather than Hertzel St.). Therefore, we should use Carmel rather than Karmel. A ministerial committee has approved a list of places that appears to be a list of exceptions or places that had ambiguous names to be resolved.

For the sake of completeness, I’d like to say that there is also another source which I found to be unreliable as far as the English names are concerned. The Central Bureau of Statistics - הלשכה המרכזית לסטטסטיקה - published a list of places at http://www.cbs.gov.il/ishuvim/ishuvim_main.htm. IMO, the English names are incompatible with neither of the aboveץ For example: ELAT for אילת, EN KARMEL for עין כרמל. It’s not even consistent within itself - it has Both EN and EIN for places starting with עין…

Great contribution.

We are just starting to take care of street names.
I went over all street names and took care of missing once and made the street names more equal without loosing any kind of translation.

Now its time to get deeper into this and define rules that will make translation of street name easier and understandable for English speakers that benefit the most.

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Here is the link to the newest streetnames of Israel.

https://docs.google.com/folder/d/0BzoRSMeOZcXDZ3dNLXJBWENKQ3M/edit?usp=sharing

They are splittet into 3 files as Google Drive is not able to work with too big files.
You are welcome to change names. Just be aware that this will really effect street names later on.

One question bother me a long time: should I put “Boulevard” or “Avenue” in name:en instead of transliterated word “Sderot”?
And if yes, which one?

Good question.

But the question should be, should we translate the sounding or the correct name.
Same goes for Sderot, Kikar, Beit Sefer, Kwish etc.

Despite the fact that “Sderot” and “Kikar” can be found on official road signs, I’m pretty sure that these words absolutely meaningless to the english language readers. So, I’d prefer to translate all translatable.

According to The Hebrew Academy, it is preferred (yet up to the transliteration bodies) to use translation rather than transliteration for general words that are used in their usual dictionary form. It gives a few examples like “רחוב, שדרה, צומת, מחלף, נמל” that would use the English words.

I propose we follow their recommendation and use “St.”, “Blv.”, “Jct.”, “Sq.”, “Rd.”, “Interchange”, and “Port”. I also propose to prefer “Blv.” for “שדרה” rather than “Ave.”, unless the actual signs put by the local officials say differently.

Nothe that the Academy’s suggestion does not apply for words that are part of the name. Their example is to use “Giv’at Ye’arim” rather than “Ye’arim Hill” or “Forests Hill”.

Also, once we agree, it would be good to add the recommendation to the Israeli wiki page

@zstadler:
What do you think of starting a wiki page for this topic and collect information how to define the translation of streets in Israel?
I can’t do that as a foreigner with basic Hebrew skills and we really need it.

This is our current information rule for the naming of streets in Israel ( there is a lot of space for more details:

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Naming

The "name" tag should be used as the primary name, in the language most common in the area. The "name" tag should contain the name in only one language. Use other "name:*" for other languages.
Use tag "name:he=..." for adding street names in Hebrew.
Use "name:en" for the English name (prefer the exact spelling as it is on the street sign!)
Use "name:ar" for the Arabic name
Use "name:ru" for the Russian name
Use "name:am" for the Amharic name
Add the full name written on the sign, don't include "rehov" or "street"
Do not use shortcuts, let the renderers do this. 

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I have done another run of street optimization over the weekend.
Every run, less and less issues…

But still not optimized on the open topics discussed before.

Beside that here some new issues I collected today:

רב רבי : Rav / Rabi / Rabbi ?

שביל : Shvil / Path / Trail ?

שמעון : Shimon / Simon ?

משעול : Alley?

רב and רבי are not the same.

רב should be translated Rav.
רבי, I think Rabbi is better.
There is also רבן in a few places which should be Rabban.

משעול is a lane
שביל is a path
שמעון is Shim’on

thanks…

I will start some definitions soon in our Israeli wiki.

Here another question.
Kwish 6 ? Should we keep the Kwish ? Should we rename it to Motorway?

A literal translation would be “highway 6” which is already included in the ref, and adds little to no value for an English reader.
“Kvish Shesh” would be useful for knowing the local name.
It follows the recommendation to keep names like “Giv’at Ye’arim” rather than “Ye’arim Hill” or “Forests Hill”.

Guys, just edited “Begin Avenue” in Herzliya and saw 4! name:he tags with actually same meaning.
name:he1=מנחם בגין
name:he2=בגין
name:he3=שדרות בגין
name:he=שדרות מנחם בגין

IMHO, 1,2,3 are very unnecessary as they already included in name:he
Every normal search engine will be able to find this street even with partial match like “בגין”
I’d vote to drop this redundancy.

Hello yrtimiD,

it is probably me, taking care of this redundancy. Even if I know that uptodate search engines should be able to find all definitions, there are apps and solutions out there that doesn’t have this kind of search engine.
In time of searching for undefined translations I’m adding those kind of translation to all streets.

One of the main reasons to do this, is not to fight with everybody if the streets sign is saying בגין or מנחם בגין
My adding should make everybody happy, and doesn’t harm anybody, non does more work for me.
They are just increasing the OSM DB a little bit.

Beside that I’m currently finishing another round of adjustment and streetname fixings.
From around 38.000 ways and names I had to adjust or add translation to around 5.000 ways.