| Next revision | Previous revision |
| names [2022/12/10 17:57] – created admin | names [2022/12/10 18:45] (current) – admin |
|---|
| ====== Supporting Languages ====== | ====== Storing Names ====== |
| |
| Many UK charities either operate overseas or have connections overseas where different languages and different alphabets are used. This goes further as different countries and cultures have different rules and [[names]] and [[addresses]]. | Many UK charities either operate overseas or have connections overseas where there are different rules for names. Plus, foreign people in the UK will be connected to charities. Additionally, many charities will be connected with "//individuals of status//", and it is important to use the correct formal names. This will be especially important when a charity is lobbying or fundraising at a high level. |
| |
| Therefore, it is a [[design_principles|design principle]] that the system will be capable of storing names, addresses and other information in multiple character sets. | Much name data will come from people filling in web forms. From these, it is regularly unclear as some information can be missing or ambiguous. |
| |
| However, a further issue is about the language of the system. The pages and descriptions that users see when they use **Charity Radar** could be displayed in different languages. Just because we could create this feature, it doesn't follow that we should. | * Mrs Smith (first name missing) |
| | * David Lloyd George (is 'Lloyd' a middle name or part of the surname?) |
| | * Prince (a mononym which is common in Asia) |
| |
| From a technical perspective, creating the system in multiple languages presents several challenges. The system needs to be designed with this in mind at the earlier stages and the amount of coding required is higher. Plus, all the content on all the screens needs translating to every supported language. This is not trivial. | Therefore, **Charity Radar** has to be able to support a variety of name formats: |
| |
| Technical challenges should not completely dictate the features of the system. We do not want to build the easiest solution but the best solution. But it would be wrong not to be cognizant of the extra workload, extra time and extra requirement for translation in deciding on the trade-off between bringing the system to market quickly and the added benefit of multi-lingual capabilities. | * Formal full name - Prof Sir David Roger Taylor MBE |
| | * Full name - David Taylor |
| | * Firstname - David |
| | * Lastname - Taylor |
| | * Nickname - Dave |
| | * Preferred short name - Dave |
| | * Preferred long name - David Taylor |
| |
| The driver of the decision should not be technical but rather strategic. | Moreover, some countries use **Nobiliary Particles**. Such as //Alexander **von** Humboldt//. In some cases, multiple nobiliary particles are used as is the case for the current ruler of Liechtenstein: //Johannes Adam Ferdinand Alois Josef Maria Marko d'Aviano Pius von und zu Liechtenstien//. Quite a mouthful but a good example of the difficulties of dealing with people's names! |
| |
| The initial consideration must be one of the project scope. If it is intended to market **Charity Radar** to markets where the language used is not English, then multi-lingual support is necessary. Even if it is only planned to promote the product in the UK, that does not necessarily eliminate the need. As noted above, many UK charities have operations, connections and offices overseas. Some of these will be in non-English speaking geographic areas. | This is an area where humans are generally better than computers at parsing information and separating it appropriately. It is therefore probably best to take the whole name and pass it through a parser. As we see more name variations, so we can improve the parser. However, at all times, we will allow the operator to rearrange the components into the correct sequence. |
| |
| | This still leaves the question of what components should we record? |
