Different Language

Julee Hicks

Although I live in the United States, when I do research in other countries, I learn to read their language. List the birth and death places in their language. But why is a place in New Jersey listed in another language when I go to standardize? It did not use to be that way. For example, I am entering a place to look for a census record in New Jersey, New Jersey, Bandaríki Norður-Ameríku.

Julia Szent-Györgyi

The standardization routine uses the website's current interface language setting to choose the placenames. If the Places database includes a name for a particular place or jurisdiction in the current language, then that's the name it picks; otherwise, it uses a name in the local language. As you've seen, this only really affects places at the country level, since very few jurisdictions below that have translations of their names to other languages. London is London and New York is New York in most languages. (My dear departed dad's habit of calling Camarillo, California _Kamrácska_ "dear little chamber" is not enshrined in any Hungarian placename tome.) Once you get to the country level, however, the interface language can make a huge difference; I can tell whether users who input a placename had the FS website set to English, Hungarian, Slovak, German, Spanish, or French, depending on whether the country in conclusions that they entered appears as Hungary, Magyarország, Maďarsko, Ungarn, Hungría, or Hongrie.

(One of the reasons I leave the interface on English is that "Hungary" is much easier to deal with than "Magyarország".)