When name seem english but no name:en exists

Hi

I have created a new map rendering of Thailand (still in beta stage so much maprendering bugs exists yet) at http://thod.servegame.com. I have for this map used name:en since I do not know thai (thinking of crating a duplicate layer in future with thai instead). While doing this I noticed that some roads seem to have an english name in the “name” tag and no “name:en” tag. So I was thinking if it have an english name should it:

a. not be changed at all

b copy the english name to name:en and leave the english name in name (easy to find these also if you make a search where name=name:en

c copy the english name to name:en and remove the english name so it is easy to spot that name is missing

If this alreday have been answered I apoligize in advance, but I tried searching for it and did not find it.

The short answer is, it’s complicated.

Sometimes OSM Thailand mappers incorrectly place an English name in the name tag and other times the object has an actual English name but no Thai name (7-Eleven and KFC are two easy examples). In Thailand, the name tag should properly be the name spelled out using Thai characters. Constructing or deriving a name:en equivalent for that Thai name is, however, often difficult and is sometimes even a contentious issue. There is a recent and still active thread in this forum that will benefit your understanding of the problem. The link is below

https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=70038

You can also do transliteration of missing names.
Be aware that libICU does o horrible job on this. You have to use RTGS.

The German local chapter map server does this. You can find the code on github.

https://www.openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=17&lat=18.80496&lon=99.01411&layers=B000TF

"Solution c " will cause more trouble than be an actual solution: the “standard” renderers will not show a name at all when only name:en is present.
“Why use name:en instead of name:jp” will be the replies of other map makers when you say that that’s a bug…
Since you do not know the thai name, better leave it as it is.

hello again. The scope of my question was only concerning roads (I had found the thread regarding Tesco and so forth). And it was only if I saw a english (but when I thought about it more Latin) name in the name propery (not any test to convert thai script).

But because this seems to be a to large issue for me to consider I decided I will probobly fix it in my db instead and not touch OSM. Thinking I will select:

  1. name:en
  2. If name:en is empty use name if it only holds latin characters.

Think this will be easier :). But thanks for quick replys.