A Curious Translation on Google Maps

Language Taiwanese and Hakka Corner
#1

There is a street (maybe more) in Taipei where the English translation is nothing like or derived from the Chinese name.

The street name on google maps is Bangka Blvd in English and 艋舺大道 (pinyin translated to meng xia da dao) in Chinese. The street signs in the area are the same.

I guess someone provided information to Google on the history of the area in Wenhua which uses both names. But I haven’t noticed it being common to see English translations that aren’t just pinyin translations of the characters which I thought were mostly automated in the Google Cloud. Are there other streets that are not just pinyin translations?

#2

There’s a thread about Wanhua/Bangka somewhere… Anyway Bangka is the official English name iirc, so it’s not a google innovation.

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#3

Not sure if this is what you mean, but I’ve always noticed that 市民大道 is written both as pinyin “Shimin Blvd” and translation “Civic Blvd” on Google Maps. I usually just see the pinyin version of street names.

#4

Both 艋舺 (Báng-kah in Taigi) and the subsequent Japanese coined 萬華 (Banka in Japanese) are transliteration of the Aboriginal location name Bangka, which means boat in many Austronesian languages, such as Filipino and Indonesian. The Polynesian word for outrigger canoe, waka, vanca or va’a are all derived from this.

The place was named “boat” because it was a trading post where canoes from the mountains would stop and off load goods to trade with canoes from the mouth of the river.

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