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:

  1. Anonymous3:06 AM

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

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous7:08 AM

    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.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Anonymous6:34 PM

    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?

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

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

    ReplyDelete