Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

Well, the labels of input fields are written in English yet user enters his name in native language.

What's the reason of having name at all? You can call the person by this name. But if I write you my name in my language, what you (not knowing how to read it) can do? Only "hey, still-don't-know-you, here is your info".

In my foreign passport I have name __transliterated__ to Latin alphabet. Shouldn't this be the case for other places?






Unfortunately, the extremely weird and idiosyncratic use of Latin script for English means that straightforward transliterations are usually pronounced incorrectly by people who try to pronounce them according to English rules.

And, on the other end of the spectrum, you have attempts to spell phonetically following English orthography, which then causes issues because it's tied to a particular dialect of English. E.g. the traditional Korean romanization of the name "Park" has "r" there solely so that "a" would actually correspond to an [a] sound in British English - but then, of course, American English is rhotic, and so it ends up being incorrectly pronounced as [park].


"Usually" it's pretty close to the correct pronounciation. Pretty much always it's good enough to be understandable.

w3c recommends adding a separate field for pronounciation - see e.g. paragraph after second image in https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-personal-names...

Wow, that's neat.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: