World maps in Russian

  • From RSS
Mikhail Daychik, Google Technical Program Manager

We launched world maps in Russian. Now, when viewing maps on maps.google.com, you will see the names of geographical objects not only in the original language, but also in Russian. For example, you can see a detailed map of Cardiff:



We translated into Russian the names of almost all the settlements of the world, the names of the main attractions and detailed maps of those places where English, Spanish, French or German are spoken.



When there is enough space, we show both names - both in Russian and in the original language, but in small winding streets, preference is given to Russian. If you know the language of the country whose map you are looking at, you can always switch to maps.google.com - there the names remain in their original form.



As you know, we needed to process millions of geographical names - and, as is usually the case with Google, we used technology, not “manual” translation. For this, a rather complex machine learning system was created that processed the data. It is not perfect, and a day after the launch, we found several errors. For example, the name 'Georgia' was absolutely accurately translated for the country - 'Georgia', but not for the US state of the same name, which the system mistakenly named Georgia, not Georgia. We continue to work on improving our system, and we hope that no such errors will remain in the near future.


Also popular now: