Tuesday, June 23, 2020

The Multilingual Map of the World



Country Names in Any Language is an interactive map which allows you to view an atlas of the world on which the country labels are written in the language of your choice.

Using the drop-down menu you can select from any language in the world to view a map on which the country name labels are displayed in the selected label. The country names for each language are fetched live from Wikidata and plotted on a Mapbox GL map.

Mabox GL has an option which allows map developers to present map labels in different labels (you can see it in action here). There is also the mapbox-gl-language plug-in which localizes the language of map labels to match the default language configured in the user's browser.

Country Names in Any Language only translates country names and doesn't translate other map labels (for example town and city names). If you use the mapbox-gl-language plug-in you can translate all the map labels to the language of your choice. However using the plug-in you are limited to only the language being used by the user's browser (and a limited number of Mapbox GL supported languages). Country Names in Any Language obviously has the advantage of allowing users to switch between different country names and to see how country names are written in any language of their choice.

1 comment:

Unknown said...

See https://openmaptiles.org/languages/