Hi all,
I created this thread for discussing the city & street naming in China as Irad requested. Feel free to post your opinion here. Please try to use English as much as you can so Waze staff can understand what we are discussing. Once we agree how to name city and street, we can put it in the Waze wiki as a rule or guideline.
Firstly, I suggest only use Simplified Chinese for all City and Street name but I have no objection to use Chinese/English format for City name. However, I strongly insist to use Chinese only on Street name. Otherwise, the street name cannot be pronounced correctly in navigation mode.
For City naming, I believe Waze has to give us ‘State Name’ just like in US. That will help or city naming more better. Irad, please consider that and give us some feedback if you can.
I do not live in China so it’s better to leave others to suggest further :mrgreen: .
If Waze could like google map to have many options for different languages, that would be perfect. However, the language display on the devices depends on what we edited. And English would be pointless for Chinese cities and streets in Chinese names.
For cities’ name, I think it is okay
But for roads’ name, there are no official English names for Chinese roads.
Different people have different translations. It would be meaningless for any single user by editors’ subjective edit.
not really, For example, in Jiujiang, there is a road named “三马路”, which could be translate into English by its meaning as “Third Road” or “Three Horse Road”, or translate by homophonic to “Sanma Road”, or “Sanmalu Road”, Or even “San Ma Lu”. If you know one or two of the translations, but the editor edit the road name in the third translation which you never see before, how can you make sure it’s working for you?
And this is not the fault of editor. Because there is no any official name or even official translating guideline for road names in China.
Not sure that the meaning in English does count as long as something in English is shown on the map…in this case any option of the last 3 options that you gave are fine with me.
Yep, normally the road names are translated by homophonic, and last three options are common use. But this translation is done by people, it is not certain that everyone translates road name in the same method as you. And even in last three options, it still get problem to search. If you type in “Sanma Road” for searching, the edited name “San Ma Lu” might not be shown to you.
I am not sure whether you ever lived in China or not. Actually, China is not international enough, too many roads and landmarks in China do not have official English name. And I have looked Waze Japan, and Waze Israel, they all use only Japanese and Hebrew in edit.
Thanks for opening this thread, here we can organize everything about city and road naming.
To answer some of the comments in my previous post, as I said we made some mistakes with the city renaming because we worked on thousands of cities and confusion is natural.
Waze is a different product than other navigation apps, we actually make it much easier for users to influence on how the app works and the mapping process, so currently Waze might not be a good choice for the Chinese driver but together with local editors and a good community we can achieve great things as we see is being done around the world.
Now for the city names and road names.
Our current goal is to make Waze better for local users, not visitors, so if you think that road naming should be in Chinese only it’s ok.
I believe we’ll improve on that and in the future enable multiple languages.
As for city names, I created a sheet containing all current cities in Waze China database.
Go over it and discuss on how to rename each city, if we should delete it or merge to another city.
Then we can proceed with applying the changes.
Provinces are not necessary for using, as least, not now. Keep concentrate on cities/towns and roads and even terrain would be more helpful. Some boundaries of coastal cities are sunk in the sea, roads on the client looks like bridges, that would be confused.
And I have applied the access of your doc, thank you.
I’ve finished the parts I edited. And you deleted some towns I edited which are already not in this sheet. Like in the US, people used town’s name a lot in short ranged travel. The county’s name always used to describe the whole region or some far away places which outsiders don’t know towns’ names. So, I think town’s name is very important for map edit.
I mean I edited the map with cities, towns and counties. However, there just cities and counties left right now. More than ten towns I edited have been removed. I’m not sure is this the new policy in Waze China, to clean towns on the map, only left cities and counties to keep map simple?
No there’s no policy, as you know Waze maps are created and edited by users, the cleanup too was done by users.
Now that we have more local users on our side we can decide on a community policy for China cities.
I went over the sheet and saw you started commenting and providing new data, I suggest we stick with bilingual city names since it’s serves the display better and doesn’t affect the search and routing.
Bilingual city names is okay, I never against that. I suggest use the format of “(Chinese Name)[space](English Name)”, as “北京 Beijing”. So that, the names will be displayed in two rows, not too long on the map.
I have modified the cities names into Chinese and English format. you can paste them into your database directly.
And I would like to know what about the towns you have deleted? Do I have to edit them back by myself, or you can restore them?
