Road Type Translation French\English

Hello, I am undertaking a project for data wrangling\cleaning, and I am working on the Montreal area data. One of the things I have noticed is that the street names are mixed between French and English (Sometimes Rue, some other times Street for example). I have decided to unify them to English, since it is the language of my course; but I am stuck with a few translation problems: how do we translate the following to English ?:

  • Chemin
  • Route
  • Voie
  • Court
  • Rang
  • Descente
  • Montée
  • Croissant
  • Carré
  • Impasse
  • Promenade
  • Cercle
  • Terrasse
    There are of course some working literal translation for some of these, like promenade and cercle, but I wanted to see if there is a standard English equivalent for these.

There are other problems as well, like inconsistency in abbreviation (boulevard → boul. for example), in capitalization…etc, if anyone is interested for the results please let me know. Thanks a lot for your help.

What language is used on the street signs? That’s the language that should be used in the primary “name” tag on the OSM objects. I’d have to assume the signs in Montreal are in French, no? Don’t change them all to English just because it’s more convenient for your project. The “name” tag should reflect what’s on the ground.

Assuming the “name” tag contains the French name, you can also record the English version of the street name using the “name:en” tag.

Thanks @alester for your reply. My bad, I probably should have explicitly mentioned that I am working over a local copy of the data, I had no intentions to change the actual OSM data itself just because I need it in English! :slight_smile:

The street signs are indeed in French, which brings an interesting point: a lot of the addresses are written in English, not in French like the actual street signs. Would that be a good project for OSM, to update the actual street names to be in French? Also, I am still stuck with the translations, so if anyone have an idea about it - I will be really grateful.