OpenStreetMap
Just finished a few map additions in Eastbourne, after a visit. It very much strikes me now, that OSM is becoming too ‘Americanized’ - I go to add a Car Park, and find it’s now a ‘Parking Lot’. Never learnt that in school! I checked my personal settings and they are still en-UK - but I’m getting ‘Mailbox’ (was Postbox); ‘Rowhouses’ (was Terrace); ‘LawOffice’ (was Solicitor); ‘RealEstate Office’ (where are all the Estate Agents?); ‘Subway’ which is a pedestrian underpass, not a part-underground urban railway; use of ‘Store’ for a small Shop; and more - not to mention the omnipresent ‘Trainstation’ (what ever happened to Railway Stations?) and ‘Mall’ (where are all the shopping centres?). I must admit that the Brits do have a problem with ‘Pavement’ but would agree with the suggestion that ‘SidePath’ is more appropriate than the americanese ‘SideWalk’ as many are now used for cycling. I don’t know who is changing our UK version of OSM to join the trendy adoption of Americanese in UK English but Please can we have our language back?
Discussion
Comment from amapanda ᚛ᚐᚋᚐᚅᚇᚐ᚜ 🏳️⚧️ on 12 February 2019 at 12:26
Where are you seeing these terms? A lot of OSM should be able to “translate” from one to the other. Do you have a screenshot?
Comment from Andy Allan on 12 February 2019 at 12:45
The iD editor uses locale information from your OSM account settings. It treats ‘en’ as ‘en-US’ by default, so you need to specify ‘en-GB’ to get the British translations.
If you have anything set in the Preferred Languages setting in your OpenStreetMap account, then check that carefully to make sure that ‘en-GB’ appears, and that it’s before ‘en’ or ‘en-US’. If you remove everything from that field, it will be re-populated with the language preferences that your browser sends (and the same rules apply about putting ‘en-GB’ first).
You mention ‘en-UK’ - I’m not sure if that’s a mistake or not, but it’s not the right thing - you need ‘en-GB’.
I’d never noticed until now, but my browser was sending ‘Accept-Language: en-GB,en;q=0.8,fr;q=0.5,de;q=0.3’ (which is approximately correct) but I had just ‘en’ in my OSM account settings from goodness knows how long ago. So I blanked that setting out, pressed save, and now my settings are ‘en-GB en fr de’ and iD now shows the British translations. Which is great!
Comment from alexkemp on 12 February 2019 at 15:49
WhatIsMyBrowser will give some broad feedback on what meta-data your browser shows to servers on the net (although it is not specific enough to distinguish between en-GB & en-US). Mine is Chromium (open-source version of Chrome) and Language Settings are at
chrome://settings/languages.Arul John sucessfully shows that although it misses on how to setup language for Chrome (must be old; advice given for FireFox, MSIE & Opera).
Comment from philippec on 12 February 2019 at 18:42
I prefer English in ID, but I prefer meters to feet.
Comment from TheSwavu on 12 February 2019 at 21:38
We can’t really blame the Americans for “train station” as the correct term in US English would be railroad station. However, un/fortunately it is just one of those things where the language is changing.