https://forum.inaturalist.org/t/select-language-for-common-names/5430
Open request from @bouteloua in 2019
Needs an urgent solution now.
Iâm not familiar with African languages, but is it necessary to associate the Kwe name with a place? Does the Kwe name Leptoptilos crumenifer differ in the regions where Kwe is spoken?
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Every single regional common name entered for Marabu Stork is clearly unnecessary except maybe the Tswana ones. Why is it necessary that the only allowed common name for Japan be the Japanese one, when that common name is already the Japanese common name, and there are no other Japanese common names? Same for German, Hebrew, etc.
I suspect practically all regional common names on inat are this way; I donât think most users would expect that the primary purpose of a âregionâ preference is to override other languages in the same region instead of overriding other regions in the same language
The goal of associating names with places is address situations where there might be different names for the same taxon, in the same lexicon, that vary by region - eg Latin America.
Maybe or maybe not, but the text in that section says to only add places when there are conflicts with other places:
But one would have to ask the people who add the places to the names why they did so. I think the text can be more clear.
I totally agree that the current setup doesnât address a lot of situations, which is why weâre working on functionality that allows you to choose both name and place name preferences (eg English for lexicon, United States for place).
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But I am understanding the current functionality correctly, right? For example, if the global English common name for an eighteen-wheeled tractor-trailer rig was set to âlorryâ, and I just wanted to make it so that the American English was âsemiâ, then in order to allow any user in the US to see any common names in their native language I would also have to go through and copy the global common name into a âUnited Statesâ common name for every single one of the 350+ other languages spoken in the United States, right?
If that is true I think the guidance should be changed to include something like âplease do not add regional common names for any non-monolingual country or regionâ
I use this as a feature I often make use of. My default language is currently German (during winter when identifying tropical beasts and plants, I prefer english). I start typing my identification in whatever language it is faster to get the correct taxon in the list. Also when using English, I can just type âbockkâ to see âBockkäferâ and thus identify as âCerambycidaeâ.
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