Display names in English

Question

I just started using OpenStreetMap, I am not an advanced user, I just want OpenStreetMap to replace Google Maps in my daily geographical searches.

I would like to display the map from the main website using the English names everywhere. Is it possible via some easy manipulation not involving javascript and such ?

Accepted Answer

You are (currently) out of luck (the question is btw a FAQ), what you are seeing on the website when you select the standard style are images that are stored as individual image files. There is simply nothing to manipulate to start with.

Naturally it is quite possible to generate a map with English names from OSM data, if you look at the cycle map layer you for example will see English names everywhere we have them in the data.

That was the short version, the long version is, yes there is technology available that moves the rendering of the map images to your browser, which gives a lot more flexibility with such things. I wouldn't wager a bet on when we will switch or provide such functionality in parallel to the current system.

The other point is that the infrastructure at openstreetmap.org is geared towards supporting our contributors and from that point of view it makes a lot of sense to show the local names.

Answer 2

If you do want names displayed in English on those tiles in the osm style, there is a new project osMap that shows tiles with English labels (amongst others) using transscription if no English name tag is available.

It's also optimized for faster tile-loading speed depending on where you are right now: just use

www.osmap.us if you are in the U.S. or Canada,
www.osmap.uk if you are in Europe or
www.osmap.asia if you are in Asia

Some more European versions (French, Spanish, Italian, German, Dutch and Danish) can be found via www.osmap.info.

As several people have asked: Access to the English tiles (as well as the Spanish and French) can now be obtained through MapTiles API.

Answer 3

If you like the standard style and you miss only the English labels, you can use this service:

[edited to not include the link to a map]

It uses slightly modified osm-carto code, so it's possible to set your own service with localized names in any other language, if you have the skills to deploy OSM maps rendering infrastructure:

https://github.com/giggls/openstreetmap-carto-de/tree/upstream+l10n

Answer 4

This solution is working for me. In the *.mml file, wherever there is a SELECT ... name ... statement, I replaced name with the following.

         CASE
            WHEN tags->'name:en' IS NOT NULL AND name IS NOT NULL AND tags->'name:en' <> name
            THEN CONCAT(name, chr(10),'(', tags->'name:en', ')')
            ELSE name
         END

This is rendering name of entity in local language with English in Roman Alphabet in parentheses below the local language name. Two items to note: If the SELECT ... name ... is selecting name as a list of fields being selected, and name has a comma after it, the CASE statement needs to have that comma after it. If name is at the end of the list of fields and has no comma, the CASE statement needs to not have a comma after it. Second item, the CASE statement is evaluating tags->'name:en'. Therefore the FROM part of the SELECT statement needs to be evaluating the tags field in the table. In the default project.mml file, some of the SELECT statements FROM parts are querying a subset of fields in the table "(FROM (SELECT...". If you want to evaluate the tags->'name:en', then you need to add tags, to the "FROM (SELECT" part of the SELECT statement.

Display names in English

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