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Thus, Bangkok is not the recommended form by the UN.    The same applies to other examples from Taiwan discussed in the call, where transliteration/pinyin is recommended by the UN instead of the popular romanized versions.  Thus, if we want to keep Bangkok (over the transliteration) we may want to document clear reasons why we want to diverge from this recommendation.  Or other possibility is that we stick to the UN recommendation and use the transliterated forms (as this may be more consistent for all city names even if it means some names may not be in their popular exonyms).

Regards,
Sarmad

Dear Sarmad,

Thank you very much for your contribution. I think we certainly need to add both terms to our definitions page. I will wait for any responses to this email before doing that.

Personally I believe in making things as simple and intuitive (e.g. close to what normally gets written on an envelope) as possible for those transliterating or translating and ideally the use of exonyms for at least countries and major cities would be part of that. Most English speakers do not know what Krung Thep is.

If, however, we are unable to locate a user-friendly list of such exonyms, we may be driven to transliteration. At least that would be a very simple rule: “Transliterate the address using the national standard transliteration.”

Incidentally, it is interesting that there are two possible Japanese pronunciations and transliterations of 日本 ‘Japan’: the formal Nippon, as on postage stamps, or the more commonly used Nihon.

I am about to send a couple of other emails picking up points made by Amr, Peter Dernbach, Rudi et al. during the call.

Regards,

Chris.

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Research Associate in Linguistic Computing, Centre for Digital Humanities, UCL, Gower St, London WC1E 6BT Tel +44 20 7679 1599 (int 31599) ucl.ac.uk/dis/people/chrisdillon