My name is written Amir Elisha Aharoni in English. In Hebrew it’s אמיר אלישע אהרוני, in Russian it’s Амир Элиша Аарони, in Hindi it’s अमीर एलिशा अहरोनि. It could be written in hundreds of other languages in many different ways.
More importantly, if I fill a form in Hebrew, I should write my name in Hebrew and not in English or in any other language.
Based on this simple notion, I wrote a post a year ago in support of localizing people’s names. I basically suggested, that it should be possible to have a person’s name written in more than one language in social networks, “from” and “to” fields in email, and in any other relevant place. Facebook allows doing this, but in a very rudimentary way; for example, the number of possible languages is very limited.
Today I am participating in the Open Source Language Summit in the Red Hat offices in Pune. Here we have, among many other talented an interesting people, two developers from the Mifos project, which creates Free software for microfinance. Mifos is being translated in translatewiki.net, a software translation site of which I am one of the developers.
Nayan Ambali, one of the Mifos developers, told me that they actually plan to implement a name localization feature in their software. This is not related to software localization, where a pre-defined set of strings is translated. It is something to be translated by the users of Mifos itself. The particular reason why Mifos needs such a feature comes from its nature as microfinance software: financial documents must be filled in the language of each country for legal purposes. Therefore, a Mifos user in the Indian state of Karnataka may need to have her name written in the software in English, Hindi, and Kannada – different languages, which are needed in different documents.
Such a feature is quite simple to implement. In the backend this means that the name must be stored in a separate table that will hold names in different languages; see the sketch I made with Nayan above. On the frontend it will need a widget for adding names in different languages, similar to the one that Wikidata has; see the screenshot below.
Of course, there’s also the famous problem of falsehoods that programmers believe about names, but this would be a good first step that can provide a good example to other programs.
Aharoni in Unicode 