location/city/etc in local language or english...

[Eric Dufresne]

Hello,

I would to know your opinion. I have travel pictures and would like to know if tourist places/monuments/buildings would be preferable to include the location/city/etc in the local language, english international translation or both.

Eric Dufresne

[johnbeardy]

It's a good question - and you could also include problems caused by name changes such as Leningrad - St Petersburg, contentious names such as Derry (in the north of Ireland) vs Londonderry (in Northern Ireland ie the UK), de facto countries such as North Cyprus etc. And there are others such as Bombay or Burma which have official names which take years until they are commonly used enough that the BBC or the Times think that most people would recognise them.

I think one should be guided by anticipating the search criteria that would lead to those pictures, and then hedging your bets and using the alternatives as keywords. So for example, it's most likely that I would be able to find some pictures of the Spaccanapoli quarter of Naples by drilling down this path - Italy / Campania / Naples / Spaccanapoli. Italia and Napoli would also be keywords. Or back to Leningrad, I've changed all the location fields to St Petersburg, and use Leningrad as a keyword for anything taken before the early 90s.

John

[peterkrogh]

Eric,
As John suggests, the decision will be guided by who is searching and where.
Your internal search will be very different than one on a stock service.  If on a stock service, do they have an automatic thesaurus?

One thing is sure, it will be much easier to localize the language (whatever the to/from combination is) if the data is already sitting in the proper field...
Peter

[Eric Dufresne]

Thanks John and Peter for your comment.

Eric