Organised way to Translate Administrative Names on OpenStreetMap

This morning I was trying to print some maps in Kannada using Marble. Then to my surprise1 I found Philippines in English, which means there is no Kannada translation available. Then ran a simple query on Overpass to see the missing Kannada country names.

Missing Kannada Country names on OSM

Missing Kannada Country names on OSM

The query prints the details in CSV format (separated by |) of all the nodes tagged with place as country. The results weren't surprising there were about 20 countries, mostly small except Philippines and Taiwan which didn't have Kannada names. I took next 10 mins to translate it.

[out:csv( ::id, ::type, "name:en", "name:kn";true;"|")][timeout:25];
// gather results
(
  node["place"="country"];
);
// print results
out body;
>;
out skel qt;
overpass turbo

overpass turbo

26036352	node	Philippines	
271048940	node	Sint Maarten	
432425099	node	Taiwan	
466507355	node	Abkhazia	
506535828	node	American Samoa	
607976629	node	Guam	
1511934680	node	Palau	
1602889766	node	Isle of Man	
1607605918	node	Guernsey	
1696850886	node	South Ossetia	
1696853468	node	Nagorno-Karabakh Republic	
1696874354	node	Turkish Republic Of Northern Cyprus	
2043451343	node	Transnistria	
2110225115	node	Palestinian Territories	
2377028247	node	Portugal	
3491215388	node	Lesotho	
3696525426	node	Liechtenstein	
4076524861	node	Malta	
4366234392	node	Kosovo	
5821200672	node		

After this effort I am wondering if this is a good way to get administrative names translated for India region. We can start with State names, then district, taluks and at last villages. A Kannada map with all the administrative names in Kannada will be of great help in schools and government related work. What do you think?

  1. Because Kannada is probably the biggest Indic language on OSM

8 Responses

  1. Prashanth M says:

    That’s a good idea! But how does on do bulk update/edit?

  2. Vikas Hegde says:

    How to do? pls explain. I want to join, not only for administrative names, but for different places. If not in bulk, but one by one also fine.

  3. Mahir says:

    Good. Wikidata have “quick statements”. If osm provides similar tool then it will be easy to upload in bulk. In fact, we can translate bulk using wikidata as source.

  1. September 29, 2018

    […] with Marble in the Kannada language, which is spoken by 40 million people in southern India. He noticed that this language is underrepresented in OSM. He created instructions to fix that problem using […]