How to enable Latin names for places in some places instead of local ones in Carto Services?

Question

Some places on the map is labeled with Cyrillic names, but I need only English/Latin names of places on the map, however sometimes there are only local names. How can I implement this? P.S.: I have spotted this issue on Belorussian and partly on Russian places.

Screenshot

Answer 1

About languages in general: after all, it depends on which languages specific placename is tagged with. OpenStreetMap has always "local" variant in local primary language, and CARTO Mobile SDK uses this by default, but the data has also other languages, so you can control it as following.

CartoVectorTileLayer (both CartoOnlineVectorTileLayer and CartoOfflineVectorTileLayer are subclasses of it) has method setLanguage(String) to select language, so e.g.:

layer.setLanguage("en");

will give you English language maps.

In SDK 4.0.2 SDK and nutiteq.osm tile source you can use following languages: local/default, en, es, de, fr, it, ru, zh (Chinese), tr (Turkish) and et (Estonian) as language

With latest CARTO SDK 4.1.0 and new carto.streets source you can use any OSM language. I would suggest to configure map based on device language settings, with something like:

// Android
layer.setLanguage(Locale.getDefault().getLanguage());

// iOs / Xamarin
layer.Language = Foundation.NSLocale.PreferredLanguages[0].Substring(0, 2);

What if specific name is not available in given language? Then the MapView will fallback to 'local' language by default, the map will not be empty. But if the 'local' language is still unreadable, so I'd prefer latin alphabet names? In SDK 4.1.0 you can configure primary and secondary fallback languages, e.g. you set primary language to 'de' for Germans, then to avoid strange alphabets (say Hebrew, Greek, most of Asia) set 'en' as primary fallback; then local is used only if both your primary and English names are missing:

layer.FallbackLanguage = "en";

Now I know you want automatically transliterated / Romanizied names, so even if source data from OpenStreetMap has e.g. names in Cyrillic only (Russia, Belorussia etc), then it would show them in Latin chars. It is not exactly same as translation, e.g. Moscow would become Moskva with Romanization, but can be helpful for many cases, actually with all none-Latin scripts, especially from Asia (Chinese etc). The problem here is that many languages, including Russian have many competing Romanization rules, so even if we would want to, then we could not do it in general SDK map rendering level. Our CARTO SDK may provide API for app to apply your preferred translation table, but we do not have this anyway. The SDK is open source and you are welcome to provide patch for the feature. I added issue ih the project for this: https://github.com/CartoDB/mobile-sdk/issues/147