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It'd be nice if it wouldn't. :) If it knows how to autocomplete the name, why doesn't it save the actual name?

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4 Answers 4

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Got this answer from the Geo Technologies folks at Yahoo:

Think of it this way : London is the UK and US version of "London", Londra, the Italian and Londres and French. In this case the spelling is different and we would be incorrect to return London if Italian or French language support is specified.

We call these sorts of issues "exonyms" ... it's the way significant place names are spelt outside of their country and language of origin. Not all places rate an exonym and the fact that the spelling of the English exonym of this Finnish town is identical to the Finnish original but less the accents is sort of clouding the issue.

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    This is a hard one, as a Finnish HR person may not like have the wronge spelling on a CV even if the CV is on a USA website! If a person want a job in that town, they had better keep all the Finnish HR people happy.
    – Ian Ringrose
    Nov 13, 2009 at 11:27
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    I agree. To anyone outside the USA, the place name corrections for whatever we type in careers are almost always wrong. I find it somehow insulting when the obviously American engine changes English place names. The YQL engine is simply wrong.
    – grenade
    Dec 10, 2009 at 12:03
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    This problem could be solved on the Stackoverflow career side by simply providing, in addition to the checkbox to not include the subtitle, a field in which we can write a subtitle of our own, so we can spell the name of our crazy foreign city however we want it to appear to potential employers.
    – Edward Tanguay
    Jul 14, 2010 at 4:31
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Here is what we get back from YQL:

<place xml:lang="en-US" yahoo:uri="http://where.yahooapis.com/v1/place/566473">
  <woeid>566473</woeid>
  <placeTypeName code="7">Town</placeTypeName>
  <name>Jyvaskyla</name>
  <country code="FI" type="Country">Finland</country>
  <admin1 code="FI-LS" type="Province">Western Finland</admin1>
  <admin2 code="" type="Region">Central Finland</admin2>
  <admin3/>
  <locality1 type="Town">Jyvaskyla</locality1>
  <locality2/>
  <postal/>
  <centroid>
    <latitude>62.240490</latitude>
    <longitude>25.751289</longitude>
  </centroid>
  <boundingBox>
    <southWest>
      <latitude>62.175419</latitude>
      <longitude>25.604650</longitude>
    </southWest>
    <northEast>
      <latitude>62.298199</latitude>
      <longitude>25.882360</longitude>
    </northEast>
  </boundingBox>
</place>

We may work on a way to override the name as a future enhancement.

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This is part of the Yahoo Geo DB. I mailed the team to see if we can change it.

Update: the thing is that the geo API in this case needs to get the lang attribute with a value of "fi" to display this correctly.

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    ok but what if I want .. er.. an "objectively correct" version? Is there any reason we in the US would not spell this Jyväskylä??
    – Jeff Atwood
    Nov 9, 2009 at 10:10
  • To answer Jeff .. Jyvaskyla is objectively correct in standard US English, and this site uses US standard English as the primary language.
    – tomjedrz
    Dec 10, 2009 at 15:10
2

IIRC they're using a 3rd party location library. So it might be some bug there. (See my other post with an issue in it)

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  • I saw that. I just thought that this is a different bug, so made a new question :)
    – Bleadof
    Nov 1, 2009 at 22:56
  • It is a different bug for sure. :) Just wanted to add this.
    – Ólafur Waage
    Nov 1, 2009 at 22:57

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