Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Israel Gets Street Maps, Georgia Gets Towns

Google Maps has added street maps for Israel.

Google Maps

However, as you can see from the screen-shot above, Israel seems to be full of streets with no names.

That is unless you search in Hebrew. Then the names magically appear.



Perhaps Google don't have a Hebrew to English interpreter.

Google have now also added labels for cities and towns in Georgia. The Google LatLong Blog says that 'new data' for a number of other countries has also been added to Google Maps.

One of the 'other countries' seems to be the Isle of Man which now has street maps. 

Hat-tip to Amos Shapira - via: Ira Abramov's Blog
Hat-tip to Mapperz for news of the Isle of Man update
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5 comments:

Anonymous said...

I wish they would add streets name into the English interface (English names of course).

Anonymous said...

Translating Hebrew names to English (especially using the default Hebrew spelling which has no pronunciation information) is extremely difficult to do automatically and I dare say is currently impossible.

So you need someone to manually go over every street name and translate it accordingly. There is also the question of how to transliterate names - Hebrew to English transliteration has several conflicting rulesets, and how to translate descriptive street names (those not named after a person) - the "official" translation is often a transliteration of the Hebrew name.

In short - its a mess and going to take time.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps, but considering that barely 10 million people have any fluency in Hebrew and about 3 billion are fluent in English, don't you think the English names have some significance?

meaw meaw said...

@Anon
Err this is a map of Israel and your arguing what exactly?

Keir Clarke said...

I don't think anyone is arguing anything. Just saying that it would be nice to have an English translation for non-Hebrew speakers.