Re: On Translating geographical names

[Roozbeh Pournader <roozbeh farsiweb info>]

On Sun, 2004-09-12 at 06:49, Raphael Higino wrote:
> Hi Roozbeh,
> 
> > 6) If you find absolutely nothing, like the problem we had with
> > "Araguina", don't translate it, or mark it as fuzzy. Don't get into a
> > competition with other languages. The English name may be much more
> > useful than a wrong translation to your user.
> 
> I don't know if it will be helpful but let me try.
> 
> The correct name of the citie is "Araguaina" ("Araguaína" in Portuguese).
> You mispelled it.

Ah, it is the timezone database that needs to make these plain ASCII
(see
http://l10n-status.gnome.org/gnome-2.8/PO/evolution.gnome-2-8.pt_BR.po
and search for "America/Araguaina").

Thanks for the information anyway, but it was just an example. There
will be other examples, like cities in China, Kenya, or Peru, many of
which could be found in the gnome-applets-locations package.

> The pronunciation is something like this: it sounds like the name of the
> country "Paraguay" but without the 'P', with "na" in the end, and the 'y' is
> tonic.

"tonic"?

> If you didn't understand how the sound is (and probably not even
> Brazilian people could understand with this poor explanation), download the
> file I recorded with the name of the city pronounced in its original.
> http://couve.no-ip.org/~trapee/araguaina.mp3

Thanks for all the hassle.

> Araguaína is in the northern part of the state of Tocantins. You can find a
> map of the state (with the indication of Araguaína) with some useful
> information in http://www.araguaina.com.br/localizacao/index.php

The point is that none of that information is useful. I don't know why,
but these pages rarely have any info on pronunciations.

> I hope I helped.

Yes, thanks a lot.

roozbeh