maps

Standards

Translating for communicating is fascinating and frustrating. People have been trying to solve this problem forever. The historical significance of the Rosetta Stone is a good example of the impact good translations can have for getting things done.

Working thoughts on documentation:

Winners write the history books

Lacking translations can introduce process friction or can be used strategically for competition

Giving up the language you know to switch to another language is a people problem, which makes it one of the hardest to solve.

XKCD has a quality take on this issue:

https://www.xkcd.com/927/

https://www.xkcd.com/927/

I recently had this experience with map making. NYC Open Data has data for bicycle lanes in several file formats. Google has a tool for creating maps and importing existing files. Here is the Venn diagram of file extensions available, and supported file extensions:

No overlap

No overlap

Needless to say, smh