Comment by philipov
6 hours ago
Looks like the French name for the English Channel is La Manche (The Sleeve) and many other countries follow this name. Whatever you think of renaming things, however, the policy of giving all the names for a place was a good one.
And then there are European countries that just use a combination. Germany has 'Ärmelkanal' (literally: sleeve channel). If you can't make everyone happy, make everyone angry.
According to the policy in this blog (and remember this is from 18 years ago), they only need to make the people who border it happy, not everyone.
It's an ok policy. For example I don't want to see "Chinese Taiwan/Republic of Taiwan" when I view Taiwan on a map as an America. It's just Taiwan to me and I'm not concerned with what people from other countries call it.
Same thing basically with the English Channel. It's just the English Channel. I don't want to see a bunch of different names for it. If the French want Google to show it as La Manche for French people that makes sense.
It's a complicated policy. What about if you're travelling in France? If someone gives you directions do you want it to not be shown on the map because you call it one thing? What about Canada, where part of the country would want the English Channel and the other La Manche. I get why showing two names would help a lot.
Sure but you can leave some of those up to local nuances - like in Canada maybe they show both. In the US maybe they don't since we only call it the English Channel.
But I'd say that it's probably not a big deal anyway because how often are you going to run into such a scenario, and even if you do how would Google/whoever capture a lot of informal names for things? A little bit of confusion is fine too anyway.
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